


Whatever You Wish For

by somuchforbaggles



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Canon-Typical Violence, Community: deancasbigbang, Djinnverse (Supernatural), Episode: s02e20 What Is and What Should Never Be, F/M, Frequent allusions to suicide, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2407370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somuchforbaggles/pseuds/somuchforbaggles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam asked Dean to put the knife down, and Dean did. Now, he’s forgotten all about the Djinn draining him of life, and lives for making his family proud of him. Dean is well on the way to his happy ending, until a so-called angel tries to kill him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> Written for DCBB 2014.
> 
> This fic has art on [LJ](http://tkodami.livejournal.com/892.html) and [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2469485) by the wonderfully talented [Tracy](http://dusty-journal.tumblr.com)! Thank you so much, you were so fantastic to work with. <3 All the images you will see in this fic were designed and drawn by her, and you should definitely check out the art post for more!
> 
> It also has a [soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/sameoldstuff/whatever-you-wish-for), and a [blog](http://whateveryouwishforr.tumblr.com) where I popped all my inspiration :)
> 
> Thanks to my betas, [Alicia](http://moderatelysexyformyshirt.tumblr.com), [Tara](http://carry-on-wayward-idjit.tumblr.com), and [Liesl](http://revengingcas.tumblr.com).
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading :)

 

_No more pain..._

It's tempting. Pain is... well, it's painful. And while you have grown used to it and learned to endure it, that doesn't mean you want it inflicted upon you.

 

_...or fear._

Yeah, like that's ever going to happen. You think what she means is no _rational_ fears. There will still be planes, here. But at least in your dream world,it isn't Schtrigas you have to be afraid of, but spiders in the crevices of your home that make your girlfriend shriek.

 

_Just love and comfort._

You could believe that. You could want that – no, you _do_ want that, you always have.

 

_Safety._

This is _your_ world. A land of your own making. There will be nothing to harm you, and if there is, then that just means you don't have to watch the people you love die before you do. It's a win/win situation, so why do you still want to plunge that knife into your chest?

Because it's not real, the voice in your head whispers. None of it's real. You're gonna die at the hand of a Djinn you could have easily ganked, and all because you wanna play happy families. Think of Sam, how selfish you are for leaving him for a new world with a new brother who has his name, face, and smarts but hasn't got his soul.

 

_You don't have to worry about Sam anymore._

But what would become of him? No doubt he will find your body, devoid of life, and mourn. But would he get on with his life? Quit hunting, go back to Stanford? Even go and see the girl you told him to marry? If you didn't need him around so much, that's what you would tell him to do anyway. Maybe this is your chance to let Sammy go, let him get out of the life he's always hated; the one that your father forced upon him, and the one you selfishly dragged him back into. You could have let him go after you got some leads on Dad's whereabouts, but you didn't want to be alone. You hate being alone.

 

 _We can have a future together. Have our own family_.

You could be a good father, you think. You wouldn't take after your own, no. You'd look after your kids like you did Sam, and he didn't turn out so bad, did he? That was all you. You brought him up, helped him with his homework, scared away the “monsters” in his closet when dad was gone for days, _weeks_ on end, even gave him the talk about the birds and the bees...

 

_Why is it our job to save everyone? Haven't we done enough?_

Your own words are thrown back in your face, your weariness with the job reflected in Sam's pleading features.

 

_I'm begging you._

Sam's begging you. A tear is trailing down your mother's face, and she's rubbing the nape of your neck with a soft, comforting hand. Carmen is _right there,_ so beautiful, everything you've ever wanted in a soulmate. Jess, Jess is _alive,_ and there are no ceiling fires in your world to consume her or your mother. She can make Sam happy. You can watch him be happy. You can watch them all be happy and alive; you can love them, and they can love you.

 

_Give me the knife._

 

 

You give him the knife.

 


	2. Four Days to Save Dean Winchester

 

You wake up in a cold sweat, your hand scrabbling under your pillow for a gun, a knife, any kind of weapon to use against the monster of the night. It's only when you realise that it was just that, a monster of your nightmare, that you are finally able to breathe properly again.

A hand strokes your arm, and a groggy voice asks, “Another bad dream?”

You nod, and your girlfriend rolls over to rest her head on your shoulder. Wisps of her dark hair tickle your nose, and you scrunch it up to relieve the itch. Her fingers trace in circles on your stomach, a comforting gesture she has relaxed you with for weeks, ever since you started having these dreams. Of course, all the things she does for you may help afterwards, but they cannot stave away the images of _running and pain as the thing swipes at you and seeing it do the same to Sam and killing it so it won't kill your brother and burning it and then the smell, the pure_ stench _of burning flesh and bile invades your nostrils and the fumes and smoke choke you and—_ yeah, there's no way Carmen could stop the panic of _it's real it's all real_ with her soothing hands.

“Just try and get back to sleep, baby,” she whispers with a kiss to your shoulder, and you can feel her taking her own advice as her eyelashes flutter against your neck. Carmen sleepily promises, “We'll get you something for them, so you can sleep without worrying about the nightmares,” before yawning and falling back into her own easy slumber. You almost want to roll her off you in case the nightmares are contagious, but instead you hold her tighter and hope that you can protect her against them.

You don't get something for the nightmares, in the end. You've grown used to them, and besides, you're finding that they seem more like visions of a past life than anything else.

What _is_ bothering you, however, is the constant ringing in your ears. Sam said that it was because you listened to your music too loudly, but the doctor debunked that theory when he examined them. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with you. You beg to differ, but you don’t really want to shell out to get a second opinion.

It started a couple of months after the nightmares. Sam and Jess had flown in for Carmen’s birthday, and while you all sat in your living room giving your girlfriend her gifts, the windows began  to crack. Something started ringing in your ear, and you had looked around the room for everyone else’s reactions to the noise, but they gave you nothing. The television screen cracked too, and then the glass over the coffee table, and the ringing got louder so you pressed your palms over your ears and frowned, half in pain, half in confusion as your family exchanged worried looks.

You thought you could make out your mom’s lips forming the word _drinking_ so you settled down, pretended like the world wasn’t crashing down around you, and smiled at the mess Carmen made of unwrapping gift-cards.

It only happens every so often. You’ve dealt with it enough for it to be dismissible, but occasionally it’ll get so loud that you can’t hear anything else, can only see mouths moving with nothing coming out, and can see splits inching their way through glass like a spider weaving a web.

You get different reactions around different people: At work it’s usually not a big deal, because you’ll be fixing a car, but sometimes you can’t tell if the windscreen needs replacing or not. With your family, it’s always a big deal. Your mother gets that concerned crease between her fair eyebrows, and she fusses over you and reassures you with a constant stream of words you can’t hear. Carmen sometimes climbs on your lap and twists your head this way and that, her brown eyes getting bigger with the things she’s not saying. Sometimes she’ll just say _‘ again?_ ’ which is pretty easy to lip read, and squeeze your hand and put the subtitles on if you’re watching something. You think you like her reaction the most. But when it happens around Sam, on video chat or otherwise, his mouth hardens into a line and his eyes dart around, and he tends to stop speaking until you give him the signal that the ringing has died down. If it were him who couldn’t hear for a while, you know that you’d mask your worried big brother nature by calling him names and joking around, and you’d at least try to get him to laugh, but you guess that the two of you are very different people.

You wish that you were closer.

The thing is, you don’t even remember why you’re not. In all your dreams, good or bad, you and Sam would die for each other, and nearly do, on a constant basis. You figure that the dreams are some kind of wish fulfillment, your unconscious mind making up for the fact that Sam doesn’t really like you that much at all. And that’s something that needs to change. You already text him more often; just mundane things, like asking about the wedding planning, or telling him random things about your day, or something Mom said that was unintentionally hilarious. Carmen had said that the two of you aren’t really close because you don’t really know each other, so you’re trying to get to know him, and hoping that Sam warms to you.

He doesn’t warm to you enough to ask you to be his best man. Instead, that honour goes to Brady, a guy Sam knows from college. You’re definitely not jealous. Or bitter. And you _totally_ don’t accidentally pour champagne down the dude’s tux at the rehearsal dinner. But, you do behave yourself at the ceremony and the reception. You cry one manly tear from your pew when they say their ‘I do’s, usher the guests into their cars and give them directions to the reception (because that’s all you’ve been allowed to do – usher), and dance with all the kids while crappy music plays in the background. You let the little girls step on your feet, and the little boys tug at your coat-tails, and when it gets late and the slow dancing starts, you offer your hand to Jess, your mom, and then to Carmen (who you totally don’t get handsy with).

They’re all beautiful. Jess, resistant to meringues of all kinds, is in this slinky white number that trails along behind her, Mom is wearing a lilac A-line dress that looks so gorgeous on her (and you hope you’re not going to Hell for thinking so too) and Carmen...well. You’ve never really thought that yellow was a great colour, but on Carmen, it’s your favourite colour in the whole wide world. The buttercup complements her tan skin and her dark eyes beautifully, and it falls just short of her shapely calves. When she twirls, the dress twirls with her, and the sight is bewitching.

Apart from the newlyweds, you two are the last on the dancefloor. You’re cheek to cheek, heart to heart, and lip to lip after a couple more songs. Unfortunately your bodies are pried apart by a sleepy niece begging to be carried, but when Carmen flashes the _to be continued_ eyes at you, you don’t mind so much.

To make the day even better, Brady doesn’t go home with any of the bridesmaids.

Over the course of the next few months, you come to the realisation that working down at the garage isn't really for you anymore. You don't think yourself above it, no, but you're just not satisfied with it. It’s not fulfilling enough. You confide in Carmen, who listens, who understands, and tells you to go for a job that's just opened up at the hospital – an EMT.

“You'll be perfect, Dean! You already have the basic qualifications,” she says, and it's funny, funny peculiar that is, because you don't remember getting first aid training. “You're great at looking after people, and you get to drive as fast as you want!”

She knows you well. You wish you could remember meeting her, dating her, learning everything about her as she seems to have about you, but you draw a blank and you don't know why. Just like the rest of your memory before the last three months.

You did ask Mom about your blanks, but weirdly for her, she wasn’t helpful at all.

“ _Hey Mom, did I get into an accident no one’s telling me about?” you asked, knowing full well how ridiculous you sounded._

_The wrinkles between her brows had deepened, and she said, “There was that thing in the warehouse a while back.”_

“ _What thing?”_

“ _Oh, no-thing!” she had laughed, putting a dampener on your intrigue._

_Everyone else you mentioned the thing in the warehouse to froze for about thirty seconds, like robots malfunctioning, and then continued on the subject before. You figured it was just a quirk of your scrambled brain, like the ringing and the cracking._

Being an EMT is a respectable job, and one that you can see yourself doing. Sam would be proud of you if you got it. You’d no longer be his loser older brother who bailed on his high school graduation and banged his prom date on prom night. This job could be the start of him actually _liking_ you as a person, and you need to make it up to him somehow, so what better way than to completely turn your life around?

 

The first time you save someone’s life, you’re so pumped you want to kiss the guy you’re training under, but you don’t because that would be weird, and you would lose your new job, and Sam would think you hadn’t changed at all. But the feeling of keeping a life in the world is euphoric, like you’re restoring the balance of the Earth, and Carmen certainly gets the brunt of that. With your first paycheck you take her for a romantic meal, and it surprises her because apparently she never really thought that you could be all that romantic. Burger, beer, pie, telenovela, then sex is your ideal night in, yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t go all out with roses and candles and dinner for two and all that.  

You video chat Sam the next day to tell him all about your new job, and he seems genuinely happy for you. You wanted to get that first paycheck before you told him anything about it past your role and responsibilities, and when you tell him, boy do you tell him. Sam watches you amusedly as you passionately talk about the job and tiptoe around where the patient confidentiality clause comes in.

“And just...oh man. It’s so awesome, saving lives and helping people. It’s like that was what I was meant to do, you know?”

Sam’s smile fills the screen. “I’m happy for you, man. And I’m kinda proud, too, I mean you’re just like, bursting with potential, I don’t know, and it’s cool to see you doing something about it.”

Sammy’s proud of you, and you don’t think you could ever wish for anything else.

Sam and Jess are pregnant. Well, technically, Jess is the one who’s pregnant, but when they called to tell you, they had excitedly yelled, _“ We’re pregnant!”_ into the phone, so maybe you were right after all and Sam _does_ have a uterus. You told him that too, and you didn’t even hear a bitchface when he ignored you.

At least Carmen gave you one of those looks as if to say _‘ Don’t worry baby, you’re hilarious to me,’_ so you grinned and plopped a big, wet kiss on her forehead, because _you’re gonna be an uncle!_ Your mom called just after, and you’d both just smiled goofily throughthe phone at each other. She talked about how big Jess was going to get, and you’d made a face when you imagined the poor woman having to give birth to what will no doubt be a small calf.

You’re going to be an uncle, you can’t stop smiling, and Carmen pulls you into bed to indulge in celebratory sex. While it’s good (very good, in fact), you really, _really_ hope she’s not feeling broody. Kids aren’t what you want, not yet, and you’d like to at least get married before you think about it. But marriage isn’t what you want either. Not yet, anyway. You want to fall in love before that happens.

You freeze in Carmen’s clinch.

“You okay?” she asks, acquainting her palm with your chest.

_Oh yeah. Just thinking about how I’m not in love with you._

“Mm hmm. Muscles went a little haywire, s’all.”

She laughs, a tiny thing, and you force yourself to relax. “I heard that happens after great sex, sometimes.” Carmen’s fingers trail lower until they tickle at your stomach, and she laughs again when it twitches involuntarily.

The expecting couple fly out for a weekend, the last time they’ll fly to Kansas until after the baby’s born, and the weekend is mostly spent listening to your mother talk about what she went through with you and Sam, and childbirthing tips, which Carmen happily joins in with. She’s seen her fair share of births. Sam takes her aside at one point to learn everything he can from a professional, while Jess is far more laid back about the whole thing.

Mom beckons for you after Jess gets roped in on the nursing session, and asks you to go into the attic to get yours and Sam’s old pram. You smile at her and oblige. It’s a nice gift – sentimental, if not a little impractical. She wheels it out into the living room when you’ve retrieved it, and the look on Jess’s face is priceless in its joy. You walk in seconds later, and Carmen takes great pleasure in dusting you down.

“I can’t believe Sam ever fit in that,” she comments with a cheeky grin.

Jess snorts. “Neither can I, he can barely get on the plane!”

“Yeah, he’s miles away from the little skinny kid he used to be,” you chime in, and Sam bites back a smile at all the talk of his towering height and his endless limbs.

He has to laugh when Jess deadpans, “Literally.”

You drink in the room like it’s the bottle everyone thinks you’re addicted to. Mom is comforting an exasperated Sam by stroking his hair, while Carmen’s kidding around with Jess, who’s laughing for two. The pram sits in the corner waiting to be filled with baby, and you’re sat in the other corner, already filled with your purpose. Happiness. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s here. You’re here. You’ve arrived at being happy, and no one can take that—or this life—away from you.

You booked a table at their favourite restaurant in town for the couple’s last night, just because you figured that they’re not going to have much of a chance to do the whole wine and dine thing soon, and when you take them there and reveal the surprise dinner, it’s weird (and you know it’s weird) but it’s like you can feel them loving you more. Especially Sam. He even hugs you. Carmen beams at you and sticks her thumbs up, and it hits you that she is too good for you, though you are determined to fall in love with her. You’ll force it if you have to, but it will come. It needs to.

Jess pats Sam on the back, and you wonder if she’s been wanting the two of you to make up for lost time as much as Car has. And if that’s true, would that mean that Sam was prepared to open his heart to you all along, just so long as you could convince him that you were trying to be a good person?

Mom looks between the two of you with her hands clasped to her chest, and you wonder if her sons being brothers means as much to her as it does to you, but then you realise that that’s a stupid thought. Of course it does; she’s your _mom._

Maybe one day, Sam will have dreams of the two of you protecting each other at all costs and think nothing of it, because it would be the truth.

You can’t wait for that day.

You can’t wait for the day that you look at Sam and don’t feel as though something’s missing, either. Even when you talk to him, it’s like a part of him is gone.But you know that that couldn’t be the case, because otherwise Mom or Jess would have said something to you. Someone would have expressed concern about him if he weren’t all there. You can’t pinpoint what’s gone, but you fear that it may be soul deep.

As you’re all seated, you’re thanked again for the _wonderful idea_ , and Jess declares that baby-talk is off the table for the entire duration of the night. You mom’s face falls, the wind blown out of her sails, and it’s kinda funny that she’s so crestfallen about it. The subject of the night defaults to your job, and then the questions come in their hordes.

You’re forbidden from discussing the gory parts of the job because the baby oversensitizes Jess’s stomach —and because you’re eating, obviously—so you stick to the good, life-saving stuff.

It’s not enough. Mostly it’s questions like:

_Do you earn more than when you were fixing cars?_

_How many people have died on you?_

_How do you and Carmen cope with hardly seeing each other?_

_Do you have dental? What about a retirement plan?_

But there are more questions, non-stop questions about things you don’t really know the answers to, and sometimes can’t answer due to patient confidentiality. Sure, Carmen is trying her best to help out, all it really does is make you look stupid. Still, you don’t need much help to do that.

The chair makes a horrible _screech_ as you push it out and excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. Everyone’s just ordered desserts, so you have at least five minutes, but all you need is a few minutes to yourself, just to collect yourself.  To compose yourself. To swallow that thick lump stuck in your throat.

You turn the faucet handle to the right and flick it up to run cold water. It’s one of those fancy sinks, with only one faucet and a bowl larger than necessary, and the water looks too white and airy, but you splash your face with it anyway. Taking a paper towel, you pat your face with it and clear your mind to prepare for the resuming onslaught of medical questions. You take a deep breath. Another. Another. In through the nose and out through the mouth. If you’re not ready to face them now, you never will be, so you turn and make for the door.

But before you push the door open, there's a rustle and then a gravelly voice asks, “Dean Winchester?”

“Who's askin'?” you reply, looking to the source of the voice.

It's a man wearing an oversized suit under a tan trenchcoat, which is odd for the weather, and an overreaction to the air conditioning. His almost black hair looks as though it's been electrified, but he doesn’t look frazzled at all. In fact, there’s only calm determination on his features. If you'd have seen him in the restaurant, you'd have said he was some nerdy tax accountant on a business outing – but you hadn't seen him in the restaurant, and your hackles immediately raise.

Rightly so, too, because he pulls a silver dagger from the inside of his sleeve and gravely says, “You should have killed yourself when you had the chance.”

You don’t have time to react. He comes at you with the blade and aims for your heart, but you duck out of the way with your hands held up in a surrender. The bright bathroom light glints off the silver in the man’s hand and reflects a line onto the wall before it blinds you for a second, and then the man’s coming at you again, this time more determinedly.

Something like muscle memory kicks in, and you knock his forearm off course and put the rest of your force in a kick to his stomach that sends him backwards, breaking a sink in the process. The white porcelain shatters around the man’s back in an arc, and for a split second they look like broken wings. He doesn’t take the time to dust himself off, he doesn’t look fazed in the slightest, and he doesn’t lose his determination.

Crap.

His trenchcoat fans out behind him as he strides over to where you’re standing your ground—something that you do _not_ think looks cool _at all_ —and as his weirdly blue eyes practically grab yours and force a stare, he says:

“I do not wish to harm you. I only wish to kill you.”

You snort. _Is this guy for real?_ you think with an eyebrow raise.

“‘Cause that makes it so much better,” you strain.

Trenchcoat-Killer (that’s what you’ve named him – you think it’s pretty catchy) hurls his weight forward and pins you against the wall with such force you can hear the cracks of the brick. It winds you, but otherwise you’re fine, as you somehow remembered to tuck your chin into your chest. You groan and cough, try to get your breath back and wonder why he hasn’t killed you instead of staring at you like he is. He’s all up in your face, his thrusted chin almost touching yours, but he’s not doing anything. He’s just _looking_.

Something must change in him, because he drops you like you’re some toy in an arcade claw machine, pockets his knife, and holds up his hands in a stilted way, almost mimicking your previous surrender. “Dean,” he starts, his low voice like the purr of the Impala’s engine, “either I need to kill you, or you need to kill yourself to wake up. This isn’t real. You know this. _Remember_. You need to _remember_ that this is a fantasy you created for yourself.”

He looks so earnest, like he actually believes what he’s saying. You’ve dealt with crazy people like this before, at the hospital when you visited Carmen after your shift had finished. One young red-headed girl gripped your arm as tightly as she could (which was actually pretty damn tight, but you’ll never admit it to anyone) and told you _there isn’t much time, you have to stop them… the rings, the rings! Four rings, Dean, you have to find them. He will rise, Lu—_

An orderly sedated her then, and you couldn’t shake off the feeling of her fingers constricting your bicep until much, much later. She knew your name. Just like Trenchcoat-Killer knows your name. Is there a big flashing neon sign above your head declaring your name? You wouldn’t be surprised if there were. Stranger things have happened.

Wait, no they haven’t. Your life has been pretty strange-free, apart from this guy.

“Okay buddy, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go get my girlfriend, who is a nurse, and then we’ll take you back to crazy person town. Does that sound like a good plan? I won’t even go to the police about you trying to murder me.” It sounds reasonable to you, and you even put on your best placating face with your best placating hands, but he scowls at you.

“I am not insane,” he says, still scowling.

You nod, a big smile of agreement adorning your features. “I know you’re not, but I think it would be awesome if we went to the hospital anyway! I’ll go get my girlfriend, and then we can make a move.”

The smile drops as soon as you turn away from him, and as you walk out of the bathroom you hear him call, “I _will_ remove you from this world!”

You chuckle. Trenchcoat-Crazy-Guy is a blip of interest on your otherwise normal life. Not that becoming an uncle will be boring, but it’s not exactly as exciting as almost being killed. You miss that kind of thing.

 _Miss almost being killed?_ Man, that little encounter must have screwed with your brain, because you have never been in that situation before, ever.

Carmen smiles at you as you walk over, and you crouch by her chair to tell her about the insane dude who just tried to kill you as you were drying your hands. Her smile turns upside down as she frisks you for any injuries and turns your head this way and that to check that it hasn’t been harmed. She’s so cute when she’s worried about you.

You lead her by the hand to the bathroom, and, checking that’s it’s free of guys with their weiners out, let her follow you in.

Into the totally normal bathroom where all the signs of conflict have disappeared.

The sink’s fixed, the cracks in the wall he threw you against are gone, and most importantly, the man in the trenchcoat has apparently flown away.

“I don’t...I don’t understand, he was _right here_ ,” you say, spinning round and checking all the stalls. “I kicked him into a sink, and he broke it, and here, here is where he pushed me up against the wall. My back still hurts from it!”

Carmen gives you a look, one that’s all pity, and she massages your back before saying in that voice you know she only reserves for patients, “Baby, maybe your back hurts because you were thrashing so much last night? I think you just need a good night’s sleep.”

“No, Car, my nightmares aren’t bleeding into reality, it was real, I promise, I—” You stop talking when you realise that you sound like a little boy, like a little boy who’s Mommy won’t believe in the monsters in his closet.

“Fuck; you’re probably right,” you say, defeated, your shoulders slumped. You rub the back of your neck and nose her shoulder when she pulls you in. “Sorry. I’ll get something for them.”

She kisses your ear, and you spend a few more seconds in her comforting embrace before a dude unzipping ruins the moment. Carmen makes a face, and you laugh quietly. You’re about to leave the guy to have a piss in peace, but she takes your cheeks in her soft hands and plants a kiss on your forehead, and you are eternally grateful to whoever graced you with such a loving woman when she gazes at you with endless reassurance and care. You really have no idea what you did to deserve her.

Both of you make your way through the restaurant again, winding through tables and chairs (you get separated when a large woman pushes her chair out just as you’re about to squeeze through, and Carmen stifles a giggle as you hope you can still have children) and back to your own seats, where your family are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they eagerly await what happened with the crazy man in the trenchcoat. Of course, there’s nothing to tell, and you can’t help but feel uncomfortable when they wear the same pitying expression that your girlfriend did.

“Did he drink before you guys left?” you hear Sam murmur to Carmen, who shakes her head, and you catch a glimpse of the look of disbelief he shares with your mother.

You wish they believed you.

The thunder wakes you up, and the bright flashes behind the curtain won’t let you go back to sleep.

Just as well. You probably would have just kept dreaming of your dad with yellow eyes, beating the crap out of you. Yeah, you're certainly in no hurry to return to that.

Lightning strikes again, nearer this time, going by how quickly thunder follows it, and it saturates the bedroom in white for only a millisecond. Carmen is none the wiser to the storm, but she rolls off your chest and pulls the covers over her head. You wish you could be as deep a sleeper as her.

The room flashes white once more, and you wait for the clap of thunder, but the only noise that accompanies the lightning is Carmen’s light snoring.

Odd.

The rain falls heavier outside, the droplets large enough to spill over the lip of the gutter, and a sudden sheet of wind-blown rain slaps your window. You see the room again in a strike of light, but still, nothing follows.

Well, nothing but the irritating ring in your ears.

You roll your eyes. _Figures._ It tunes out the howling wind, the rain patter, and the rumble of Carmen’s snores, so at least that’s three positives, and at least no one’s here (or conscious) to gaze at you with pity. There’s nothing you can do but wait for it to pass, but there’s no pressure. It’s actually quite freeing, for once.

The bedroom flashes twice, and on the second, a silhouette appears in front of your curtains.

 _Fuck._ This is just like one of your nightmares. For a split second, you expect it to pounce on the bed and rip Carmen’s throat out with its teeth and then advance on you, so you find yourself leaping up into a fighting stance. It doesn’t move, but you stand your ground anyway.

The ringing in your ears brings you out of panic mode as you remember that there’s nothing wrong with your hearing in your dreams, and the more you stare at the silhouette, the more you realise that it looks more like a man than a thing. Still, you reach for the baseball bat by the door, and wield it in your hands as you watch the black shape of the intruder.

“Who the hell are you, and how did you get in my house?”

The ringing stops.

The man steps forward, and a flare of light reveals his appearance to you. It’s the man who tried to kill you in the bathroom of the restaurant.

You readjust your grip around the bat, put your best foot forward, and swing at him like his head is an oncoming baseball.

The bat shatters, thick dust and chips of wood snowing onto his shoulders and settling into his hair, and all you can do is stare at him wide-eyed.

“What are you?” you ask in a low voice.

"We need to talk, Dean," he says, and it still freaks you out that he knows your name.

 _" What. Are. You._ "

He looks up at you intensely and puffs out his chest. “My name is Castiel, and I'm an angel of the Lord.”

"Get the hell out of here. There's no such thing," you say with utter certainty, flicking your eyes up and down his wingless figure. He comes closer, though you can't remember stepping back, and your whole body tenses as Castiel eyes you unblinkingly.

"This is your problem, Dean," Castiel monotones in his rough voice, still pinning you with the sure blue under his brow. "You have no faith."

His lip quirks, and his hands spread just enough to catch your eye. Thunder sounds at the same time the room fills with flashes of light, and it's Castiel's doing for sure. You startle at the noise and blink at the light, but you have to keep the so-called angel's gaze when a pair of shadowed wings emerge from his shoulder blades.

You feel small, unworthy, and a little spooked, but you give the angel the tiniest of nods.

"Before we discuss anything else, I believe I should apologise for the noise you have been hearing. The ringing. It was my true voice. I thought, given the circumstances, that you would be one of the...special few to perceive my true visage. I was wrong."

"That was you talking?" The incredulity in your voice doesn't faze him, and he's still looking at you – no, _into_ you unnervingly. You haven't seen him blink once, and you know that if he did you'd feel it in your soul. To shift the discomfort you feel at that, you forget the soul staring and tell him, "Buddy, next time, lower the volume."

"Yes, as I said, I was mistaken." He sounds almost disappointed that you're not 'special', and you kinda want to see him tell your mom that her son's not special.

But hang on – Castiel said _given the circumstances_. The hell kinda circumstances was he talking about?

"What did you mean by 'circumstances'?" you ask with suspicion.

Castiel blinks then, and you’d class it as a victory if he didn’t say, “I can’t tell you that.”

“Bullshit.” You fold your arms. “I hear this ringing in my ears for months, see cracks in windows, friggin’ have to put up with the condescending looks my family give me, all because you’re trying to talk to me – but you can’t talk to me now? In your...false visage?” Whatever the hell that means.

“I understand your frustration.”

“Do you?”

There’s a pause, and then he says, “Perhaps not.” His eyes dart upwards, his head lifting towards to the sky and his lips parting slightly with the motion. “I don’t have much time, Dean”—he’s cut off by the electric blue lightning that strikes just outside your window—“You _have_ to kill yourself, believe me when I say that. If you don’t, then—”

Castiel is cut off a second time, this time by nothing. He simply vanishes as quickly as he had appeared, leaving you with nothing but confusion and a conflicted psyche.

You stay up the whole night, just to make sure that it wasn’t all a dream. If you fall asleep again, you’ll have no idea if you dreamt the trenchcoat-clad angel, so you stay in bed vigilant, in case Castiel comes back, or if something happens to Carmen. You only leave to fill the thermos with coffee, and are truly relieved when she’s still snoring away on your return. You watch her sleep, stroke her hair, touch her skin, and give in to all your senses. Her tanned skin is all soothing and soft from the cocoa butter lotion she uses, and so what if you bury your nose in her neck? It’s comforting. It means she’s real. You can’t dream smells or touches.

Hopefully Carmen won’t mind waking up to the smell of her skin mingled with your coffee-flavoured kisses.

It’s another six months before you see him again. For the most part, you’d forgotten about Castiel the angel and whatever he couldn’t tell you. Although, occasionally, a man with electrified hair and a tan trenchcoat would walk past you, and your head would whip around to find Castiel, but it was never him.

You don’t know why disappointment sinks your gut when it isn’t him. At least the ringing and the cracks have stopped, though. Unfortunately, so has the feeling of freedom that accompanied it.

Once, Carmen and you were walking hand in hand along the street, and you saw a flash of blue eyes and a flap of a thin coat on the other side. You snatched your fingers from Carmen’s and ran across the road, barely missing cars and bikes just to face the angel who was so determined you be suicidal, but it wasn’t him. Of course it wasn’t. You still aren’t sure whether you imagined him on the night of the storm.

Whenever the thought of him resurfaced, you always tried to ignore it, but apparently, the live embodiment is a little harder to ignore.

“Hello, Dean,” he says, interrupting the dinner you’re eating alone. Carmen’s on call tonight.

You choke spaghetti down. “Jesus Christ, you scared me.”

He cocks his head and gives you a peculiar look. “My name is Castiel,” the angel says, somehow conveying irritation and innocence at the same time. “The Messiah and I are entirely different beings.”

“So you’re not the Messiah, you’re a very naughty boy,” you murmur to yourself, twirling your fork, hopefully appearing more nonchalant than you feel because _there’s an angel in your house again_ and you haven’t seen him for months, haven’t even heard his voice or seen the cracks it causes.

Castiel says nothing, shrouded in mystery and a trenchcoat. Maybe Heaven doesn’t have movie theaters. In that case, you’re definitely not looking to go skywards after you kick it.

“What do you want?” you ask, putting your fork on the side of your plate and looking at him. You’re hardly going to want to eat if he’s Heaven-bent on talking about killing you.

“You know what I want.”

You roll your eyes. “Cryptic, much?”

“Not at all. I believe I made my purpose very clear in our last conversation.”

“That was six months ago, man. I can’t even remember what I had for dinner last night.” Bored of giving him your undivided attention, you start to eat again, and wonder if you romanticised the idea of an angel in your life during the months he was absent. You probably did, if you’re being honest with yourself, and you feel a little guilty for once thinking of his appearance as the most exciting thing to happen to you. But, in your defence, you were drunk, and you and Carmen had just had a fight about both of your work hours.

Castiel pauses while you eat, standing so still you want to ask him whether he needs a brain from the wonderful wizard. When he does speak, it’s stilted but practiced, as if he’s reading off cue cards in front of a mirror.

“I want you to remove yourself from this dream you are living in, and return to your brother and your...family business.”

You frown and ask through a mouthful, “Family business? What, do we own a store or something?” You deliberately skirt around the dream thing; you don’t want to indulge him.

“You and Sam hunt monsters. The memories you have of your previous life are seeping through your consciousness, but you call them nightmares. You were hunting a creature called a Djinn on your own when it captured you, and it is slowly feeding from you as you live out another life in your mind, one constructed around what you most wish for.”

You’re almost afraid to ask, but Castiel tells you anyway.

“The Djinn granted you this wish: the fire that killed your mother when you were four years old never happened.”

Oh.

Castiel walks towards you, his gait stiff as if his knees would collapse if he put too much bend in them, and stops just by your side.

“Perhaps this will aid the truth.” It would be a warning if it weren’t said so softly, and he extends his arm to press two fingers to your forehead, and—

It all comes rushing in.

 _Night, Sam.Then fire fire fire and_ take your brother outside as fast as you can now Dean now _and you see your home burning and where’s Mom where’s Mom, Dad? But you learn that not talking is better than talking and you only whisper good morning to your brother because the last time you wished him goodnight bad things happened like fire and no Mom and sad Dad but also angry Dad._

_You don’t understand but then the monsters that come alive at night come alive in the day too and they’re much scarier than you imagined and then you see Dad kill a man and you still don’t understand. Dad says that the man was a monster and you still don’t understand. If monsters look like men, then how can you tell the difference?_

_A man-monster tries to kill Sammy and then you understand. Everyone’s a monster in their own way, but some are a special kind of monster, and that’s what makes you wonder whether your dad’s a monster too._

_No no no your dad’s a hero because he saved Sam but that’s your job now, to keep Sam safe so Dad can keep the world safe, only sometimes he’s not Dad anymore but Sir. You call Dad’s friend Sir too but he cuffs you round the ear and tells you to call him Bobby, and you like getting to use a grown up’s grown up name because you have to be a grown up to look out for Sam._

_And then training and making a sawn-off and deliberately forgetting homework and more training until finally hunting, and killing._

_And more killing. And more killing. And more killing._

_But saving, too. You save people, and teach Sammy that saving people comes first before hunting things, but then somewhere along the way he wants to research more which you’re fine with because he’s safer in a library than he is hunting, but then he hunts too and he’s good, more than good, because your dad actually compliments him and you’re only a little bit jealous because you taught Sam the most important things._

_Then Stanford happens._

_Then Dad disappears._

_Then you find Sam to help look but he’s got an interview on Monday but not anymore because Jess died like your mom died and then you’re killing more things than ever because you’re protecting your baby brother from more harm and then finally you find Dad but you die and he sells his soul for you and tells you that you might have to kill Sam and you don’t want to talk ever again because you’d rather die than kill the one thing in your life you love more than the Impala, and it’s on your mind it’s on your mind it’s on your mind and you’re killing things killing things killing things and then there’s a Djinn that needs to be taken care of and you end up_

here.

You can’t eat any more. There’s a faint clatter of the fork on the china plate but you ignore it. Your stomach heaves but clenches its contents. Your head feels like it’s going to explode with all that you’ve remembered.

“Shit,” you mumble woozily, closing your eyes because the room is spinning, but you have to open them again because your eyelids throb as if they’re the only things stopping your brain from pouring out of your sockets. Logic says that your brain will stay where it is, so it’s okay that your eyes are open, but the room’s still spinning and Castiel is spinning with it and you still want to throw up or poop or both at the same time.

Yeah. Puking and pooping sounds good.

Fingers press against your throbbing head again, and everything’s the right way up again. You don’t want to puke or poop anymore, and your head doesn’t hurt but the memories are settling themselves in an uncomfortable place.

Instinctively you clutch the amulet around your neck, the one Sammy gave you, but it’s not there. Instead, your fingers grasp cool metal. You’re wearing a meaningless chain. The Dean you were knew nothing about newspaper-wrapped gifts from his little brother. The Dean you are now doesn’t feel right without it. You don’t feel real.

“Dean,” the angel calls through your haze, “are you alright?”

It’s not genuine, it’s frickin’ _customary,_ and you snap, “Don’t ever touch me again, you got that?”

Castiel stands upright and clears his expression, and it’s only then that you realise he was bent over and concerned.

“You should show me some respect,” he says coldly.

You want to say _fuck yourself with the stick in your ass_ but figure that won’t help you stay alive in your dreamworld. Because that’s all it is. The life you’re living. It’s not real. It’s all a dream. A wish.

_A dream is a wish your heart makes…_

You heard Jess singing that to the babies in her bump (yes, plural – they’re having twins and they’re both freaking out non-stop) when you were video calling Sam the other night. It’s from Cinderella, you think.

_Whatever you wish for, you keep…_

That doesn’t apply to you. You don’t get to keep your mom when you wake up, or Jess, or Carmen.

Fucking Disney songs.

You stare down at your forgotten dinner, stomach growling to warn you off it, and swallow the bile in your mouth. Castiel is still glaring at you, his hair and chest puffed out to remind you that he’s a fucking angel of the lord and shouldn’t be disrespected.

“Thanks for the memories, I guess,” you say through gritted teeth.

Castiel gives you a haughty look as if to say ‘that’s more like it’, and you kinda wanna sock the guy on his stupid jaw that always seems to be either clenching or setting in a patronising way.

“Now that you remember your real life, it’s best if you end this.” He glances upwards and around him, and his voice is so derogatory and blasé, like 'this' isn't the best dream ever, and fuck him, because it’s real to you.

He flies in here, puts you off your food, and orders you to kill yourself. No thank you.

Only you don’t quite say it as politely as that.

“Yeah, not gonna do that,” is what you sarcastically simper instead, and you get a hollow satisfaction out of watching his jaw tick and his eyes narrow before he disappears.

 _Hopefully forever,_ is what you think, but also what you don’t.

You’ve got some time left before the Djinn completely drains you of life, why not make the most of it? At the very least, you’re sticking around for the births of your niece and nephew, little John Robert and Erica Mae. John was for your father, Erica was for Jessica’s aunt, who was a second mother to her, and you suggested Robert as a middle name for your nephew, though it only dawns on you now that it was subconsciously for Bobby.

Yes, you’ll stay to see Sam’s kids, and then you’ll return to reality.

 


	3. Three Days to Save Dean Winchester

 

It doesn’t quite happen like that. New Winchester-Moores Johnny Robert and Erica Mae are born, and they are the cutest. Their first birthday rolls around, and then their second, and then they can do more than gurgle when you tell them tales of hunting things that go bump in the night with their dad. They talk back and appear avidly hooked on what you once called your nightmares (it’s easier to think of them as bedtime stories for both you and the twins), and are always climbing on you for cuddles or tickles or wrestling matches, which they always win because they are _twin toddlers_ and practically the spawn of Satan. Cute spawns of Satan, though.

Of course because your brother’s playing happy family, you and Carmen are repeatedly asked when the two of you are going to tie the knot and pop a kid out. The both of you usually shrug sheepishly and honestly say you haven’t really talked about it, because you haven’t, but you both know that most likely neither will happen.

It’s okay, really it is; you love Carmen, and she loves you, but wedding bells can’t be heard over sirens wailing and charts flipping. Sure, you dedicate a couple of nights to spending time together, but more often than not one of you falls asleep before anything intimate happens. In that respect, you’re already like a married couple. And in fact, you get yourselves off more often that you get each other off, and that’s fine too. You’ll peck each other on the cheek, forehead, or lips, maybe watch for a while, and say ‘ _Imagine I’m your hand, honey!’_ before leaving for work.

It’s hardly the dream life, but it works for you and Carmen.

The thing is, you’re getting caught up in your not-life again. It’s been what –two, three years since you last saw Castiel, so for all you know Heaven’s given up on you. You don’t blame them. But you know that you’ve still got life left in your real body before you die. You’ve probably been in this reality for about two days now, so you have another couple left, which is something like fifty years here. Yeah, you can do math, sometimes. Sam isn’t the only smart brother.

It’s strange. Even though you were placed in this life as a guy with nothing going for him but his good looks and charm, you’ve made something out of it. You’ve become something better than that. You’ve got a job, a family, love and happiness in your life. You’re actually _proud_ of what you’ve achieved. And maybe, just maybe, you can do that for yourself out in the real world too. You’d still hunt, but you’d be worthy of the better things in life. Hell, maybe you can even find yourself someone to fall in love with out there.

Still, that’s the future, and you’re living in the moment. Carpe diem and all that. It’s empowering.

The sense of empowerment fills you up and overflows like a bucket left forgotten under a running faucet, and it shows for days. You wake up earlier than usual and coax Carmen out from under the covers to kiss her, morning breath and all, and run your hands over every part of her you haven’t touched recently. It culminates in some really slow, amazing morning sex, and while you both want to call in sick so you can hit repeat all day, the people of Lawrence, Kansas need you.

You don’t give up on a boy who overdosed on some unknown drug, and he lives. He lives because you refused to give up on a young hopeful life. Other people live too, like an elderly lady who fell down her stairs for the umpteenth time, and a little girl attacked by some animal. They live because you’re living, and it’s contagious.

You visit your mother, hug her and bury your nose in her floral scent, keep her company while she makes jewellery to sell online and at craft fetes. And if you can’t see her, you make sure to call her every day, even if it’s just to tell her about a recipe you tried out.

You text Sam more often, try to get him to move closer, because there are law firms in Kansas too, and you miss him. You miss not going a day without not seeing him, you miss the easy banter and the bitchfaces he makes. You miss saying _bitch_ and you miss him saying _jerk_ in return. You miss him riding shotgun in the Impala. You’re pretty desperate to see him more, and Jess and the kids, and you somehow manage to wear him down enough that he agrees to look at houses in Kansas.

“I’m not making any promises,” he says down the phone, “so if there aren’t jobs for me and Jess, then we’re not moving.”

“But if there are…?” you grin, the light inside of you feeling brighter than ever.

Sam sighs, but it’s masking a smile. “Then I guess we’re moving to Kansas.”

Carmen gets the full brunt of your joy, and boy does she appreciate it. You’re not one for being in control all the time, but neither is Carmen. You’re both happy to be the ones doing the fucking and to be the ones being fucked, and when both of you are fucking each other at the same time...well, you see stars for hours after you’ve come.

 

The high you’re riding comes crashing down when Castiel shows up again.

Carmen was offered a last minute pass at a conference in Cleveland, so you’ve got the place to yourself for the week. This was actually the week the both of you booked off work so you could spend time getting to know each other again, but Car was too excited about the conference for you to beg her to stay, so you’re on your own for a week.

Well, you _thought_ you’d be on your own for a week.

You’re in front of the TV catching up with the telenovelas you’ve been missing when the air feels thin around you. Your ears feel like they did when you flew in that plane that one time, like they’re going to burst from the pressure, and all the hairs on your body stand on end.

Distantly, you hear the sound of a paper bag being hit by a speeding car, and Castiel appears on the couch next to you. You mask the way he makes you jump by clenching your butt cheeks.

“Hello, Dean.”

You stick _Alma Gêmea_ on pause. There is no way that damn angel is messing with your treasured telenovela time. “Long time, no see.”

“How long has it been since you saw me last?”

“A year, maybe more?” you hazard a guess, shrugging.

He drags his gaze from you and stares ahead at the TV set. “And still you are here.”

“I figure I still got time,” you say unapologetically, shrugging again. “Why not get the most outta my wish?”

“Because, Dean, you are _dying_ , and if you die, then the whole world suffers.”

Woah, dramatic much? You’re just a guy who hunts things. There is nothing special about you whatsoever. You really don’t know why Castiel keeps bothering, why he keeps coming back. You’re going to click your heels three times eventually, so why can’t he just leave you to it?

You laugh derisively. “Sure it does, buddy. Now if you don’t mind, I gotta find out how Mirna’s gonna beat Cristina’s ass.”

With that, you press play on the remote, but immediately the screen is a snowstorm before the sound of an unexpected drum at four in the morning _BANG_ s and fireflies escape from the back.

“What the hell?” you mutter, spooked and confused (the lesser known sequel).

“Guess again,” the angel says, his tone not giving away whether it’s with humour or not.

Of course the angel would break your TV just to make a point. If he wants to get you on his side, he is far from doing it the right way. Now you have to shell out the money for a new TV, as well as explain it to Carmen, and all because Castiel wasn’t digging the cheesy Brazilian telenovela. Pretentious douchenozzle. And there’s only one thing to say to pretentious douchenozzles who break your TV:

“Fuck you.”

Castiel pointlessly flies two feet towards you with a _whoosh_ and, with his face centimetres from yours, says in his gravelly voice, "I think we need to have another conversation about respect, don't you?"

You want to kiss him just to spite him, just to see how he'd react. He'd probably enjoy it just as much as an ironing board with a trenchcoat waiting on it would.

“I thought angels were supposed to be guardians,” you say to his incredibly close—and very blue—eyes. “Fluffy wings, halos – you know, Michael Landon. Not _dicks_.”

“Read the Bible. Angels are warriors of God. I'm a soldier.”

A soldier. So that’s what he is, huh? You coulda sworn he was a flying dick monkey. But you don’t say that, not when he’s looking at you as intensely as he is, like he could atomise you with a blink. And he probably could, too.

Irritably you ask, “Can I get back to Mirna and Cristina now?” and, still staring at you, Castiel sticks his arm out and spreads his fingers in a small wave over the TV. The smoke evaporates and the screen blares back on, and still irritated, you mumble, “Thank you,” with just a hint of petulance.

You wait for him to fly off like he usually does, but he only flies to the other side of the couch and leans forwards, his elbows on his thighs and his fingers steepled.

“Umm...aren’t you leaving?”

“No.”

He sounds as petulant as you did a moment ago.

You huff a surprised breath and return to watching Mirna lose it with Cristina, who is a major bitch. She throws Cristina in the pigsty and makes a mud pie of out her face. It is satisfying as hell (though Cristina’s lipstick is still suspiciously perfect) and you don’t even feel a little bad for reimagining the scene with you as Mirna and Castiel as Cristina.

Stealing a glance over at Castiel, you see him curiously enthralled by the turn of events, and somewhat saddened. Not that his face gives much away, being an emotionless mask for his (probably equally emotionless) true form, but you can see it in his eyes. There's pain in them, and not just the wounded pride of Cristina reflected in them.

“Angels…” he quietly starts, still watching the scene unfold, “though we will never admit it, we aren’t so different from humans.”

You get the feeling that he’d be smote if one of his own heard that.

Castiel doesn’t elaborate, and you don’t pry further.

Well, until you _do_ pry.

“Is that why you can possess some poor bastard just like that? ‘Cause if I’m rememberin’ correctly, you told me that this”—you gesture to his body—“wasn’t your true visage.”

He has the gall to actually seem affronted by your remark. “I did not possess him. He is a vessel; a devout man who prayed for this.”

So that’s what Christians do when they’re not not having sex. They pray to be angel condoms.

You scoff. “Did you even know his name before you made him into your very own treehouse? Did you let him tell his family?”

“His name is Jimmy Novak,” bristles Castiel, “and the only business of his I needed to know was whether he would consent to my inhabiting his body.”

“And he’s still awake in there? Could he come out if you let him?”

“Yes, and yes. But the latter is not necessary. I doubt Jimmy could convince you to follow God’s plan if I cannot.”

“Try him,” you dare.

The angel sounds a resolute, “No.”

Ahh well, it was worth a shot. And at least you know a little more about angels. You don’t know whether it’ll help when you’re out, if Castiel will stick around to piss you off or if a new angel will focus its many eyes on you, but it’s something. Something to tell Sammy about, something new to write in Dad’s journal. You’re actually glad that you’re not one of the ‘special few’ to see Castiel’s true visage, as you can’t draw for shit. You could probably describe it using vague adjectives, but Sammy can’t draw for shit either.

A strange yet comfortable silence settles while the show cuts to a break, but you get antsy during an infomercial and it's not just due to the completely inept people starring in it. You might know who his vessel is and what Christians do in their free time, but you don't know what the angel's still doing here, why he's watching a telenovela of all things on your couch, or even why he hasn't killed you yet.

Still, can't hurt to ask.

"Why haven't you killed me?"

He doesn't look at you when you speak, which doesn't infuriate you in the least, and doesn't even turn his head in your direction until after he answers.

What an ass.

"I'm trying a different approach," he says, and _then_ he looks at you, all assured steely eyes with a smug twitch at the edge of his mouth.

"What, you think you're just gonna sweet-talk me into – oh come on!"

The couch inhales as Castiel flies away into another dimension, and, disgruntled, you throw the remote at the empty spot. Maybe his different approach is to irritate you into ending this life so you never have to see him again. Eventually, you think that could work.

You don’t expect to see him for at least another few years, but you wake up the next day, and he’s sitting on Carmen’s side of the bed.

“Holy creeper, Batman,” you mutter as your heart rate slows.

Castiel squints upon being called Batman, but blinks it off. “Hello Dean. What were you dreaming about?”

You scowl at him. If he was peeking through the curtains of your mind, you’re going to be _so_ pissed. Somehow, you managed to take Carmen back with you to the real world, and set up a base – a home for you and her and Sammy.

It had burned down, with Carmen inside.

“We need to talk about personal space.” You pull the covers over your exposed chest, even though you know a good little angel like Castiel isn’t going to look at your perky nipples.

“What of it?” asks Castiel, somewhat derogatorily.

You roll your eyes. “Humans. We need it.”

He cocks his head to the side, his eyes sparking with intrigue.

“Okay,” you huff, “think of an invisible circle with a diameter of, like, two meters around everybody. If you get _inside_ that circle, either you’re gonna offend the other person, or you’re gonna get kissed.”

“I do not wish to do either,” a frowning Castiel says.

“I didn’t think so. So put that in your angel files, and don’t forget about it.”

Castiel assesses you with narrowed eyes and purses his lips ever-so-slightly. _Aww._ Look at that. The little angel’s putting effort into something. He gingerly backs away from the bed and stands, shuffling back for good measure, and nods at you, expecting acknowledgement of his accomplishment.

You nod back, amused. Something flashes on his face, quick as lightning, and you realise that it was a different kind of pride to the angelic brand you’ve been seeing. It’s kind of refreshing.

Before you get too caught up in reading the angel, you tack on, “And a second thing – you don’t just ask someone what they were dreaming about. It’s weird.”

He doesn’t say anything, which you’ve come to know as angel speak for ‘alright’, and consider him taught.

“So what are you doing here?” you ask, stifling a yawn.

“I am attempting to persuade you to return to your own world, which you can do by killing yourself.”

You roll your eyes again and sigh. “I told you, I’ll do it soon.”

Castiel snaps. “Every day you spend telling yourself you’ll do it _soon_ is another minute your body spends weakening under the administration of the Djinn’s poison. You have been here for twenty-two hours already.”

Only one part of that sentence catches your attention. “A minute there is a day here?”

“Roughly,” he says, distracted and irritated, “although for every day that passes in reality, more time passes here. One minute becomes fifty seconds, forty, thirty...until you die.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Believe me, it is the contrary.”

You don’t have the heart or the tolerance to introduce him to sarcasm.

The both of you are at a stalemate, two kings on a board where you both have power, but can easily be made vulnerable. Castiel’s weakness is the Djinn, and yours is him.

He does that thing where he tries to look into your soul, and gives up and looks away. Whenever Castiel does that, you can’t help but withdraw into yourself a little. Your soul, even replenished by your happiness in this dream world, is still marred by the person you really are. By your deeds, by your failures. You don’t blame the angel for taking a passing glance at your soul.

You wonder if he can see your face past your soul, if he can choose whether to take a passing glance at that too, or whether for him, your soul _is_ your face.

There’s so much about angels you don’t know. You didn’t even believe they existed until Castiel flared out his wings like a modest peacock. Dad didn’t think they existed either, no matter how many times Mom would say that angels were watching over you, so there were no pictures in his journal to clue you in.

Bobby would believe in angels, you think. Him and Sammy probably bonded over that when you were out being trained in the art of using a sawn-off.

“I shall leave you to tend to your needs,” Castiel says, looking down his nose, “and then I shall be back.”

Oh goodie. You can’t wait.

He disappears and stays disappeared while you shower and such. It’s nice to get to shower for so long. What with the work hours and the need for sleep, you don’t get much chance to relish the water pressure. And you’re a sucker for good water pressure, always have been. You spend an abnormally long amount of time washing your hair – longer than you do styling it, which is a first, and make mental plans to book yourself in for an Indian head massage. If it feels half as good as you trying it on yourself, then you’ll be lucky if there’s any blood left in your head to fully feel it.

Out of the corner of your eye you see the present Mom gave you for Christmas. The Man-per set, the former of which is apparently a masculine play on the word ‘pamper’. You don’t get what’s so girly about the word, but hey, at least it saves your man-pride. You mess with the lotions, smearing and rubbing them on your hairy legs, your looks-softer-than-it-is stomach, your perky chest, your meaty arms, and even your freckly ass, because you like the idea of Carmen caressing it and getting that glint in her eye. Out of common sense, you don’t put any on your dick, no. Instead you dry it thoroughly with the fluffy towels Carmen bought last month with a voucher that was nearly expired, and check yourself out in the bathroom mirror when you’re all done.

Still in the buff, you wiggle as you work product through your hair, and don’t stop when you remember there’s no-one to wiggle for. Unfortunately, that means you’re still wiggling your baby-smooth butt when you hear a familiar _whoosh_.

Castiel assesses your wiggling and squints at your reflection. “This is a bad time,” he steadily states before flying off again.

 _Shiiiiiiiiiiiit._ You’re going to die of embarrassment, you’re sure, and Castiel is finally going to be happy. Perhaps this was his plan all along, to embarrass you to death. You like to give the impression that you’re body confident, that you don’t care who sees what part of you, but _you do you do you do_. So very much so. _Painfully_ so.

You cringe as you dress yourself quicker than you’ve ever dressed yourself, and wait on the bed for Castiel to show. Your socks are mismatching, your shirt is all bunched up, and you have a sneaking suspicion that you put on the pants with the broken fly. Still, at least your hair is mussed the way you like it.

The angel returns after another twenty minutes, when you’re still berating your butt wiggle.

“I apologise if I...interrupted you earlier. I miscalculated the timing of your cleanse.”

So, naive little Castiel only saw your helicopter dick because your shower was longer than usual. Of course that’s what happened, because you are destined never to have anything good, not even a long shower. It’s only usually in the real world that your life is like that, but it’s bleeding in, allowed by the wound Castiel is making in your psyche.

“Whatever, man,” you reply, gruff. You brush your off your embarrassment (though you know you’ll definitely be hiding your face and making strange groans tonight) and adjust your shirt, because you don’t like the way he’s looking at you. You rarely like the way he looks at you.

Instead of lowering your gaze, you stare back while you fiddle with your shirt. Cowering before his awesome presence is what he wants (probably), so you decide then and there to never drop eye contact with him until he drops it first. You think wolves do that too, as a dominance thing, to show they’re the alpha. Castiel may be the alpha of the pack up in the clouds, but you’re the alpha of your world. While the angel is in your dream, he will bow to your rank.

Not that you vocalise this.

“So, what can I do you for?” It’s a stupid question, one you know the answer to, but it’s always fun to say no to him.

“I wanted to ask you a question.”

Oh. Either you were wrong, or Castiel isn’t as blunt as you thought he was. You’re betting on the second one.

With your silent expectant go-ahead of a nod, he asks, “Have you always done the exact opposite of whatever’s asked of you?”

You laugh, surprised. “Pretty much.”

“And what about your father? Did you disobey him too?”

It’s all quiet save the tick of the clocks around the house. A muscle in your upper lip ticks too, and you grit your teeth as you feel a snarl twitching your lips.

He gives a small impression of a shrug, and there’s an almost _pleased_ gleam in his eye.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, _Castiel_ , so I suggest you shut the _hell_ up.”

“The screams of Hell are difficult to silence; a fact you will discover very soon.”

The snarl drops, and your narrowed eyes widen. “What?”

You don’t find out what, because as soon as Castiel opens his smug mouth, there’s a jingle and a creak.

“Hey honey!” Carmen’s sweet voice greets from the front door. “The conference got called off, which is a bummer seeing as I paid tons for gas, but it means we can—oh, there you are—it means we can spend the week together like we planned.” She grins before she kisses you on your slack lips, but it turns upside down when she notices her affections are unreciprocated. “What’s wrong?”

You stare between her and Castiel, who’s only just out of her periphery. Castiel is unmoved by her entrance, and doesn’t fly away even when you jerk your head. He simply frowns, and you wish he would become flappable for entirely different reasons.

“I can explain,” you slowly say, holding her arms.

“...Explain what?” Car turns to where your gaze is, and freezes in your hold when she locks eyes with the angel.

“I...I…” you stammer, because apparently you can’t explain how there’s some dude in your bedroom.

She sighs, which isn’t the reaction you expected at all. You expected confusion, maybe freaking out, perhaps a demand for a better explanation immediately, but Carmen just spins around to face you again, an unimpressed expression souring her pretty face.

“What is that on the wall?”

What is _what_ on the wall?

You peer closer, pretending to look past Castiel, who’s standing as stock still as an awkward teenager at a party full of hot girls. Fuckin’ awkward weirdo angel.

But, there’s definitely something on the wall, thank God, because otherwise you’d look insane as _she can’t see Castiel._ But if you _can_ see Castiel, does that mean you’re the insane person? You can’t believe you never thought of that before. Maybe you are insane, and this isn’t a dream, and—

“You are not insane,” Castiel bites out of the corner of his mouth, barely containing the roll of his eyes.

Yeah, okay. That’s exactly what a hallucination would _want_ you to think.

But back to the stuff on the wall.

“Oh, that?” You laugh nervously. “That, that is...uh, some of the stuff Mom got me for Christmas. Honestly, I don’t know how it got there, all I know is that it did.”

Carmen lights up. “The Man-per set?”

You nod, and she trails a finger up your arm. She does the same with the other arm, and smacks her lips together when she slides her hands under your shirt.

“Very nice,” she purrs. “But try not to get any more on the walls, okay?”

“Or what, you gonna teach me how to apply lotion?”

“Maybe.”

“Well I think you should cop a feel of my ass first, ‘cause I think I did a pretty good job there,” you murmur before you take her smiling lips with yours.

You moan into each other’s mouths, and it’s only when you pull away to take your shirt off that you remember Castiel is in the room. He isn’t now.

Carmen pushes you on the bed and takes off your pants. Your underwear is next, and then you realise that you’re completely naked, and she is not. Just like it was with Castiel earlier. The memory causes a face not dissimilar to that of brain freeze, and not even the gentle kissing of your ass can take your mind off it. You tell her to stop, and she complies, but when she asks you what’s up, you don’t comply and answer. You grunt and shrug and then shrug her off, and wince as she unpacks loudly and in silence.

It’s three in the morning, and there’s someone whispering in your ear.

“Go back to sleep,” you say to the whisper, but it doesn’t obey your sleepy orders.

“ _You will be a righteous man._ The _righteous man. Though I have my doubts, they say you have potential, so I shall stifle them.”_

“Shuddafukup,” you mumble, batting the noise away, but still, it continues, a distant rush of wind outside your window.

“You shuddafukup,” Carmen chimes in, pulling the covers over when she rolls, exposing you to the cold.

The chill alerts all the hairs on your body, and _you get it okay_ , so you’re up.

The whisper is not just a whisper anymore.

“I have faith in you. I’ve had faith in you since the fates revealed our future, but...having met you here has marred it.”

You stretch, pop a couple of vertebrae, and squint through the dark. You should really eat more carrots.

“But I don’t just doubt you. I doubt myself. In the future I saw, I was brimming with more doubts than I could have ever imagined myself having, and it was because I met you. And Sam, let’s not forget Sam—”

“Cast’yel?”

The angel is standing somewhere in your room, spouting a bunch of crap you can’t make heads nor tails of, and you want to _sleep_ , goddammit.

“Is ruining my days not good enough for you anymore?” you hiss, rubbing the gold out the mines of your eyes.

It’s quiet, but thanks to the lack of the sounds of Batman’s cape trailing behind him as he pounces on a criminal, you can tell that Castiel is still in the dark. (Literally. You’re the one who’s metaphorically still in the dark.)

Instead of anything in particular happening, he just says, “End this, Dean,” seemingly resigned.

 _Whatever_ , you think, slipping back under the covers.

Aaaaand _there’s_ the trailing cape of Batman.

You think you dreamt it.

You think you’re insane.

You think you might be the sanest and most awake you’ve ever been.

You think you’re confused.

Carmen’s been avoiding you all day, which is the exact opposite of what the two of you were meant to be doing this week. You’re oscillating around each other but never coming into contact, and it’s niggling at you like a worm in an apple. You thought it was going great between the two of you, that you were convincing yourself and Carmen that you could stick it out, that you would for everyone’s sakes, but apparently things are...less than great.

She takes the kitchen and the lounge in the ‘divorce’ for the day, leaving you with the bedroom and the study. It’s probably just as well. You wanted to read something anyway, to immerse yourself in a life that wasn’t yours. (Again.)

You don’t do very well in that. It was easy before because you had the help of a hungry Djinn, but now you’re stuck in just two worlds instead of your preferred three, and it’s a crappy day in a usually happy life, and you’ve fucked up again.

Your head is in your hands when you hear the tell-tale rustle announcing Castiel's presence, and you keep it there as you ask into your palms, “Aren't you sick already?”

“Sick?” the angel repeats back at you. “No, why would I be sick? Though this kind of dream walking can certainly be taxing, I am not—”

“Tired, sick and tired,” you add with a heavy sigh. “Of trying to convert me to your cause. Aren't you fed up of me saying no yet?”

“No.”

You snort and let your hands fall away from your face. “I'm a lost cause, man, can't you see that? I'm happy here, and there's no point on coming back every day or month or year or whatever to point me towards the rabbit hole, because I'm not going back. I can't.” Your voice breaks on its last words, cracks as though its mirroring the pangs of your heart, and you can't find it in yourself to care.

“You can, and you will.” Castiel's eyes are fixed upon you, rotted on your weathered features and unnervingly sure. His mouth hardens in a line, just as it does before he usually flaps away to Earth Mark One, and you ready yourself to stare at nothing, but he stays. He stays to say, “Your happiness here is an illusion. The fate of the world rests upon your shoulders, Dean Winchester: Righteous Man, and only you can save your brother from corruption.”

When you hear that last, ominous sentence, you jump to your feet, alarmed, and ask, “Corruption? Is Sam in danger?”

But the only answer you get is the wind rippling through the curtains.

“Castiel, you son of a bitch!”

The door hinges creak behind you. “Is everything okay, baby?”

It's Carmen. Somehow, her entrance is more surprising than Castiel’s, now. Her hand trails around your middle as she appears in your periphery, and suddenly there's a cool palm on your face, cupping your cheek. Those lines between her brows are there again, the ones that recently only appear because of you. You kiss them once to smooth them, and draw her in so you don't have to look at how you failed in your efforts, resting your head on hers and breathing in the scent of her hair.

“I'm fine,” you murmur, and immediately Carmen tenses and pulls back.

“I wish you wouldn't lie to me,” she says, concern pursing her lips. “I know you're not fine, and I know _you_ know you're not fine, so why won't you tell me? Why won't you talk about it?” When you say nothing, she sighs, shakes her head, and bitterly whispers, “I wish you would trust me.”

Unfortunately for her, this is the world of your wishes, and not even you can get everything you wish for.

Her brown eyes shine pleadingly as you hold your silence still, and with a hard swallow, Carmen drops her fingers from your jaw. “I'm going to stay with Sunny for a couple of days, and when I come back, I want to talk. About you. About us. Okay?”

“Okay.” You catch her hand as she makes for the door, and don't have to fake the pained face you make as you breathe a barely audible, “I'm sorry.”

In a blink Carmen's face softens, but the threat of tears still swims in her eyes, and she gives you a minute smile as a thanks – for what, you have no idea. But you are far more preoccupied with what Castiel said about Sam—Sammy, that is—being corrupted. By who? By what? According to Castiel, you have only been in this dream state for twenty-two hours. What could have happened to Sam in that time?

Unless Castiel was talking about the future. The future, where you are some sort of Righteous Man, whatever that means, and save the world with your Righteous powers of Righteousness. Isn't that more reason to end this? So you can save Sam? Screw the world, it's only Sam that matters.

But Sam's your weak spot. Everyone knows. And everyone takes advantage. Why is Castiel any different? The angel could be lying, just to get you to follow your apparent fate.

Any thoughts of what to do elude you, so you do the thing you do best nowadays. You sleep.

When you awake, it's with a sense of foreboding and a heavy weight on the edge of your bed. For a moment, you think Carmen's back, that she wants to talk now, before you've even collected your thoughts, but it isn't her. It's Castiel.

You scramble backwards, hitting the back of your skull on the headboard, and pulling the covers up to your chin, you rub your head and grumble, “What the fuck are you watching me sleep for?”

Castiel tilts his head to the side, something you're starting to find either irritating or endearing, and plainly says, “You aren’t sure if I was lying about Sam.”

“Of course I'm not,” you snap, your skull throbbing dully. “For all I know, you could just be trying to get me in into the _real world_ so you can kill me, properly this time.”

Looking almost wounded for half a second, Castiel shifts and reaches two fingers out to touch you, like he did when he revealed the true nature of this universe. You don't recoil as you did last time, but you eye him warily and await whatever he does.

He grazes your forehead with the pads of his fingers, and suddenly your head doesn't hurt anymore.

“If I wanted to kill you, would I have healed your pain? It was going to leave a bruise. You would have winced every time you washed your hair for three days.”

You feel like you should probably thank him, but don't all the same.

Castiel looks down and lets out a small sigh before meeting your eyes more resolutely than he ever has before. You can almost hear the key turning in the lock that fixes your gazes, and you're suspicious of what the angel can do when all thoughts dissipate and you're left with nothing but blue eyes convincing you to listen and believe.

“You need to trust me,” he says. He's talking about trust, and Carmen was talking about trust, and no one trusts you to stay away from the drink for long or even hold down a job, so why the fuck should you even consider trusting anyone when you know that this is all a lie anyway? It sets something off in you, and the blood runs through your veins quicker, encourages your fingers to curl into your palm, and puts a twitch in your jaw.

“I don't need to do anything,” you bite, your eyes no doubt flashing with anger.

“You need more than you're willing to admit.”

What's _that_ supposed to mean? You frown and stare him down, not giving him the satisfaction of telling you all the things you supposedly need. Silence has become so much for you recently; a weapon, a defence mechanism, a way of coping...you feel as if you're four again, being quiet until you understand what's going on, why all you hear is gunshots being fired and eggshells being stamped on when you should be hearing the former in _Bambi_ and the latter in the kitchen.

The bed creaks when Castiel moves off it to sit in the chair in the corner of the bedroom, and you take a small victory when he's the one who looks away first. He looks thoughtful, something you wouldn't have been able to see a few minutes ago, or even when you had met him in that bathroom, because your eyes have finally adjusted to the light, and they have also adjusted to Castiel. Leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs, he steeples his fingers, and you wonder whether he is deliberately creating a place of minuscule worship or whether it's his angel subconscious.

“When I am here,” he begins trepidatiously, “no other being can see me. Not the Djinn, not the other people in your fantasy, not my superiors. You can see me because I appear only to you, my charge, and because in the future I have laid claim to your soul.”

Wait, he's what?

“You lay claim to my soul?” you ask slowly, uncertain of whether you should feel dirty or purified.

Castiel swallows. “I'll get to that in time. The reason I wished to speak of who can see me...is because I am going to tell you why you are so important. Or part of why, anyway.”

“Isn't that the first thing on the big man's 'don't' list?”

“I am aware.”

The way he says it is so dry that you laugh a little. When Castiel hears you, the corner of his lips gives away a tiny quirk, and you make that a victory, too. You out-stared an angel and even made him smile.

Before you can tell him to get on with it, Castiel softly starts, “You were meant to eject yourself from this universe a day ago, where you would have found Sam trying to wake you. Two weeks from then, Sam disappears, and when you find him, he is killed in front of you. You sell your soul to bring his back, and you are taken to Hell a year later.”

You wait. You wait for Castiel to tell you the rest, to tell you that he wants to bring you out so you can kill Sam's murderer before they get to him, to say that Sam's death can be prevented. A selfish voice in the back of your mind screams at you to add ' _so you don't have to go to Hell'_ to that, but you don't blame yourself for selling your soul so Sam can live. He's the one out of the two of you that can really have a normal life. He can go back to that cute art dealer and marry her, just like you told him too, and he can _live_. You've lived your life of normality here, in the wish that your mother never died, and that's enough for you.

“Dean.” Castiel's voice cuts through your thoughts, a patient anchor, and he explains, “If you do not eject yourself, then you will die, and Sam will become...well, I can only tell you that he will not be your brother anymore."

“That’s the only thing you can tell me,” you seethe, trying to control your anger. It doesn’t work. “That’s the _only thing_ you can tell me? That Sam will become somethin’ that ain’t my brother if I don’t go all _City on the Edge of Forever_ on this fantasy dream timeline crap?”

Dad warned you about this. Before he died. He said that you might have to kill Sammy, and you know about his visions, about his sometimes-telekinesis, but you can’t imagine that going bad. Probably because you never want to imagine killing him.

Castiel hasn’t responded. It’s hardly surprising, seeing as the angel is about as closed off as a book with all its pages glued together. Still, that book would make a good weapon, and that’s all Cas is. He’s just a hammer.

 _Cas_ tiel _is just a hammer,_ you correct yourself.

You figure that he’s probably not going to talk any more about Sam and what’s going to become of him, so you hark back to what Castiel said that he could get to later.

“So what about the part with my soul and you laying claim to it?”

“You are vital to God’s plan. When you have been in Hell for thirty years, an army of angels is sent to rescue you, and I am the only one to make it to you.” He looks despondent, and you almost feel bad for the future loss of his brothers and sisters. “When I find you, I raise you from perdition, and...we—as in you, Sam, and I—have equal parts in bringing the apocalypse upon the Earth.”

Despondency has turned to discomfit, as though he doesn’t quite believe it himself, that he, an angel of the Lord, would bring about the end of the world.

“How do you know all this? Are angels omniscient, as well as God?” You can’t help but spit the last word.

“The fates showed me, but only because you tampered with the timeline. When the timeline is restored, only then will I forget everything – including you and this world.”

“Am I gonna remember you?”

Castiel shakes his head. You’re not sure how you feel about that. On one hand, you’ll forget the way he remind you of the moles in whack-a-mole, but on the other hand, you’ll have to relearn everything about him: how to piss him off, how to make him almost smile, and how to read him.

You don’t know whether you’ll have the patience to do all that again.

You stare into his eyes for a long moment, and wonder whether you’ll recognise them in the first instance you see them. You’ve stared into them often enough, long enough, and hard enough, so much so you can’t even imagine forgetting them. They say so much while Castiel says so little; they are the windows to his grace, and to the growing speck of a human soul he has hidden away. You wonder – will that soul wilt when he forgets to allow you to water it? Or will he somehow remember how to tend to it, even as it will stay as forgotten as you?

You think you’re okay with him forgetting you, just so long as he does not forget what he has growing inside his grace.

“Carmen wants to _talk_ ,” you tell your mother as she slides pancakes in front of you. This happens every week now; you’ll appear on her doorstep at stupid o’clock, and she’ll fix you something to eat while you dance around whatever subject that’s been eating you. You’re usually a lot more vague, as your concerns mainly consist of a certain angel, but this is something you don’t have to re-word and analyse a hundred times over.

“Talking’s good,” she says pointedly. “It’ll help you work things out.”

You frown and freeze with the fork halfway to your mouth. “Things?"

“Yeah, you know, honey. _Things._ Lord knows your father and I had our problems, but once he took his head out of his butt long enough to talk them over, things ran a little smoother.”

“Mom, I’m twenty eight. You can say ass in front of me.”

She clips you around the ear. “No cussing, young man!”

“Okay, old lady.” You both smile at each other, and your mother’s smile is enough to make you forget that you haven’t lived with it your whole life.

You fork pancakes into your mouth as like always do, like these are the last pancakes your mom is ever going to make you, and she watches you in her fond mom way with her chin resting in her palm.

Mom turns the subject back to why you’re here seeking the solace and comfort of her pancakes.

“What do you think Carmen wants to talk about?”

You shrug. “I ‘unno,” you mumble through your mouthful. “Prolly ‘bout our relationship?”

She stares at you for a second before saying, “Uh-huh...anything particular in your relationship?”

You shrug again.

“I can see why she wants to talk,” Mom says dryly.

Swallowing, you ask, “You don’t think she’s gonna break up with me, do you?”

It’s your mom’s turn to shrug, but of course hers is far daintier than yours, and she even does that cute thing where the side of her mouth pulls. “Maybe it’s a good thing, you don’t know. Maybe she’s pregnant.”

You choke on your next helping. “Oh God, I hope not.”

Neither of you say any more until it’s time to do the dishes, and even then you only discuss the weather for this time of year.

Carmen can’t have kids. She sits you down on a rainy Saturday and tells you so. One of her friends in gyno gave her a free check up because of the lump she’d found near her throat, and that she’s been diagnosed with an overactive thyroid, but with her case it’s really nothing to worry about unless kids are in the future.

But did you want to have kids? Eventually, you kinda did. You were looking forward to being a dad, to teaching your kids that mullet rock never died, how to play baseball, and watching Disney movies with them. However, potential kids are not more important than Carmen, and you say that to her as you take her hands.

“Car,” you start, and it only dawns on you then that _of course you would fall in love with a woman named Car._ “You are way more important than some kids we might not have had anyway. I mean don’t get me wrong, there’s something sweet about those snotty little brats, but that’s exactly what they are: snotty little brats. So believe me, I’d much rather stick with you than go father a child with someone I don’t love half as much as I love you.”

She gives you a watery smile, and says, “I love you too,” before leaning forward to catch your lips in a salty kiss. You rest your foreheads against each other’s, and she laughs shakily before croakily admitting, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”

You lift her hands to your pursed mouth and kiss them individually. “Doesn’t matter that you cried. It doesn’t matter that we can’t have kids. It doesn’t matter.” You kiss her again, but something feels wrong, like you unknowingly meant more than you said, and the troubling thought of this being your dream, yet you can never create a family crosses your mind. Surely if this is your world, you control it?

Unless something deep within you doesn’t want Carmen to have kids. Unless somewhere in the roots of your heart you know you don’t love her like you should.

You don’t linger on that for too long; you’re more eager to linger on Carmen’s sweet lips. The both of you linger on the other for a long time, until the rain stops and the lamplights glow golden in the night, and with her head pillowed on your shoulder, you come down from your own glow. It’s the first time you’ve made love in weeks, and it was enough to strengthen the connection between the two of you. And hey, when the both of you aren’t loving on each other as softly as you just did, at least there won’t be kids to hear you or walk in on you.

A part of you wishes there were.

When Castiel comes back after two years of radio silence, he’s different. And not a good different.

Determination emanates from him, and he’s lost that almost-relaxed slope to his shoulders, but there’s something in his eyes, something that only appears in the millisecond after he blinks. Fear.

“Hello, Dean,” he says, cooler than usual.

Warily, you say, “Hey,” and stay where you are. When he hung around for sporadic periods over a few days last time, you felt yourself gravitating towards him with every minute he stayed. You can’t have that again.

Being drawn to an angel. Pssh. What’s next, Sammy sexing up a demon?

Castiel pins you with his eyes, which are still flicking between fear and fierce resolve, and it’s as though you’re in that bathroom again, waiting to be beat up.

“It’s been two years,” you casually comment. “Where you been? Thought you’d given up on me.”

“It may have been two years for you, but it has been longer for me. In human years, that is.”

You frown at that. Human years? Are humans to angels what dogs are to humans? God’s loyal pets, understanding his words only through poorly-guessed translations and contextless quotes, being good boys and girls because they don’t want to incur his wrath? It sounds about right. Those who believe are given treats in the forms of small miracles if they’re good enough, if they pray hard and long enough, and those who won’t listen to their master are sent away to the pet shelters of Hell.

You wonder how angels are any different. Perhaps they have the illusion of being superior; the cats to your dogs.

“We don’t perceive time the same way humans do, so I am unsure how long I was disciplined for, but if it has been two years for you, then I must have been in Heaven for a long time. A very long time.”

When you hear _disciplined_ , a muscle jumps in your jaw. Now you recognise what that fear is in Castiel’s eyes. It’s the fear of God.

You should have seen it before. You’ve seen it a hundred times before, in the mirror and in Sammy’s eyes after _Dad_ , but you never thought angels could experience it. Maybe Castiel went to Heaven’s equivalent of a pet shelter.

It’s good that he’s learnt to hide it, though. When they know you’re scared, they’re worse. They don’t stop. They keep on with their words or their slipper or the buckle of their belt until they can’t see the fear anymore, because fear makes them angry. Makes them think you’re weak, that you need to learn a lesson.

You’re almost glad that they’re dead in your world.

Softly, you pry, “What do you mean by disciplined, Cas?”

You don’t know where the nickname came from, but he doesn’t take kindly to it. Either that, or he doesn’t want to replay the last two years.

His hand twitches, and then your hand is curled around the handle of the meat cleaver.

His wrist flicks, and then your head is drawn back, the blade of the cleaver threatening your exposed neck.

“I could force you,” Castiel says, deep and crisp and even, like his voice is the frickin’ feast of Stephen. “I could force you back into your real life."

A snarl curls your lip. “You’re better than this.”

You mean it. You know it.

“Whatever they did to you, it’s my fault, I know, but just – don’t do this.”

Castiel’s upper lip snags like it wants to mirror yours, but he controls it. Just like he’s still controlling the blade at your throat.

“You don’t understand. If I don’t do this, you will die entirely, and I...I will too.”

There’s that fear again, only it’s raising his voice this time, and you do understand.

“Do it then.”

He balks minutely, but then that confident gleam is back and Castiel raises his hand with his eye on the cleaver.

“C’mon, Castiel, _kill me._ And look me in the eye when you do it.”

You don’t know where this antagonistic bite has come from; you’re only this obnoxious when you know you have a way out, when you can see Sammy behind the monster with a gun or a knife.

Raising your chin defiantly, you ask, “How’re you gonna do it? You gonna take me out like I’m a vamp? Or are you just gonna slit my throat?”

Castiel glares at you. His nostrils flare uncontrollably and muscles are ticking away all over his shadowed face like a clock’s gotten loose under his skin, but you’ve been up against scarier things. A nerdy dude in a trenchcoat is no match for your father’s temper, even if he’s got angel juice running through his nerdy vessel’s veins.

You push your neck into the blade and feel a warm trickle of blood pool in your collarbone.

“This is what they told you to do, right? So _do it._ What are you waiting for? Daddy’’ll only give you your treat _after_ you do the trick,” you goad through strained vocal chords. “Another angel would have killed me by now!”

His hand twitches again and presses the blade further into your throat, and the red pool at your collarbone overflows when you laugh.

“But you’re not like other angels, are you, Cas?”

Castiel is a dog, just like you, and you think he’s slowly starting to realise it, and that he’s also realising that he may become a stray very soon if he doesn’t please his master.

“Kill me!” you damn near shout at him, pain pulsing from your throat.

You stare fiercely into his dark eyes, taunting him silently, expecting and hoping Castiel to be pissed off enough to do it swiftly.

And swiftly, the cleaver falls to the floor with a dull thud. Your arms and legs are released from their hold against the arms and legs of the chair, and still a little weak, you falter when you stand to meet Castiel’s defeated gaze. A hand reaches your shoulder to steady you, and surprisingly you don’t bat it away.

Castiel sighs, and his stoic stance deflates. You are not the one being steadied anymore.

His eyelashes flick his brows, and you see that those blue blue eyes are tired. Tired of looking at you, still here. Tired of disappointing his family. Tired.

You don’t even question that that’s what’s clouding his eyes. You’ve seen it in the mirror far too many times to be wrong.

The hand on your shoulder withdraws after it warms your neck, and replacing it at his side, Castiel says, “I hope the next time we see each other is in Hell.”

Wind ruffles your hair, and instead of pondering the lack of pain at your throat, all you find yourself thinking about is why his one-liners are so damn cool.

That night, you replay everything but his one-liner.

He said that you didn’t understand, so you lashed out, but you do understand.

You understand that you’re selfish, that you’re scared of somehow being important, that you’re a bad person for putting Castiel’s angel status on the line so you can keep living in a world where you don’t entirely hate yourself. You understand that you need to kill yourself to save yourself, and to save Castiel.

You’re going to miss him. Bits of him, that is, like his flappy trenchcoat and that permanently frazzled frown. You wish you could see him one last time, just to shake his hand or slap him encouragingly (and lightly) on his scratchy cheek, just to give him your gruff thanks for believing in you the weirdest way possible. You wish you could see Castiel one last time to somehow undo what the angels did to him.

But you won’t get that chance. You won’t even remember that you need to undo it the next time you see him. That’s if you ever see him again. As far as you know, he’s just going to drag you out of Hell, and that’s that. Castiel gets a pat on the back, and you get your life back.

Those facts should spur you on with a smile on your face, but in reality they punch you in the stomach, and slap any semblance of a smile off.

At least once you forget him, you won’t have to think about that wish again.

Really, you’ve had more than enough time here. You’ve spent years with Mom, you’ve patched things up with Sam, and you’ve experienced the love of Carmen. You know how it feels to have someone in love with you now, and for a little while you were in love too.

 _It’s okay,_ you tell yourself.

It’s okay.

You’re actually gonna do it. You’re gonna end this whole dream, and wake up in some warehouse with Sammy crying over you, because that’s how it should be. The Sam here wouldn’t cry over you the way your little brother does, and that’s okay. You’ve come to realise that now. He’d mourn, yes, but he wouldn’t blubber like a kid who’d scraped his knee, like your Sammy.

But you’re not doing this for the tears. You’re doing it because you can’t lie to Carmen anymore, because you don’t want Castiel to be disciplined by his angel bosses, because you’ve seen Sam happy and Mom alive and well and because you love your job more than hunting.

You’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do. You just need to say goodbye to your mom first. She’ll make you one last sandwich, and maybe you’ll mow the lawn, and you’ll hug her and remember how she smelled like flowers and fancy soap, and then you’ll do it. You’re not sure how yet, but you’ll figure it out.

 _Castiel_ , you think loudly, then quietly wonder if that makes this a prayer, _I’m gonna do it. Give me an hour, and then I’m gonna correct the crap outta this timeline. I’ll see you on the other side, buddy._

You get in the Impala and while you cherish her civilian feel, you miss what makes Baby your Baby. There’s no _S.W_ or _D.W_ carved into her, the heater doesn’t rattle with lost legos, and there’s no remnants of broken army men scattered across the floor. She’s a good car, but yours isn’t just a car. She’s home.

The traffic lights are all green on your way over. No, scratch that, they’re all _blue_ , which is strange. But it doesn’t matter. It just means that you can get to your mom faster before you change your mind.

You take your eyes off the road for a second to root around in your tape box. Nothing like a little Zep to play you out.

You take your eyes off the road for another second as the tape slips out of your hand, and just as you keep your eyes off the road for another second to pick it up, that’s when the world turns electric blue, and then black.


	4. Two Days to Save Dean Winchester

 

 

_The first time you see him, he takes your breath away. He’s gorgeous, so gorgeous that your throat goes dry, and you can’t order. Sam has to tell him what you want to eat instead._

_The second time you see him, his tight waiter’s uniform makes your mouth water instead of the gourmet burger he places in front of you. You thank him dreamily, and Sam makes fun of you throughout the whole meal, but you don’t mind. Never has anyone made you as tongue-tied as your waiter, so you’re savouring it, daydreaming about being tongue-tied with him._

_The third time you see him, boldness flares up and you ask if he’s on the dessert menu. He goes pink and stammers and gives you this tiny bashful smile and it’s the cutest fucking thing ever and you want to swipe everything off your table and furiously make out with him on it, but you don’t, because he bites his lip and winks shyly, and you melt into a puddle._

_The fourth time you see him, it’s because Sam asked for the check, and your waiter brings it over. Sam smirks when he sees the total, and your stomach roils because who the hell smirks when they get the check? But there, in chicken scratch handwriting at the bottom of the flimsy paper, is a name and a phone number._

_His name is Cas._

_His name is Cas, and he holds your hand on the first date._

_His name is Cas, and he kisses you on the second._

_His name is Cas, and he makes your heart sing when he takes you to bed for the first time._

_His name is Cas, you say as you introduce him to your family._

_His name is Cas, and you’re in love with him._

_His name is Cas, and he’s in love with you too._

_With him, you take the steps you never thought you would with anyone. You move in together, you argue in Ikea, you argue building the furniture you bought from Ikea. You keep your distance from him when he’s been volunteering as the cat shelter, and you sneeze into his mouth when you can’t resist cuddling. You celebrate one anniversary. Two. Three. He buys you dinner at the restaurant he used to work at for your fourth anniversary, and you buy him a ring._

_His name is Cas, and he says yes._

_Everyone cries when you both say your ‘I do’s’, including the both of you. You both cry when you become uncles, again when you become uncles a second time, and then once more when the adoption is approved._

_His name is Daniel, and he’s your son. He’s had a hard life so far, but you and Cas plan to make a better one for him. You move into a house, get a guinea pig, take turns driving Danny to school, make excuses when he walks in on the two of you fucking one night, are so damn proud when you learn that he’s top of the class, and you love him unconditionally._

_Danny grows up into Dan, but you still call him by his childhood nickname just as Cas still calls him by his full name, and you’re both regular embarrassing parents. Danny graduates and flies from the nest to a college halfway across the country, and when you say your final goodbyes after unpacking everything into his dorm, you hug him as tightly as you did when he sprained his ankle when he was seven. On the way back home, you drive one-handed while Cas holds your other one. You sniff the tears away. It seems like only yesterday that you met that scared kid and knew he was meant to be a Winchester._

_The house feels bigger, the echoes louder, something your husband only loves because now you both can be as loud as you want. Danny surprises you both by coming home early one Christmas, and this time you can’t excuse your naked rutting as ‘we fell over getting changed’. Apparently he’ll never be able to look at the two of you again in the same way._

_Danny gets his degree, brings a girl home, then a boy, then someone who doesn’t identify as either; you like xem the best. Xe’re awesome, and xyr hair changes colour each time Dan brings xem round._

_Xyr name is Rowan, and you make sure to teach your parents Rowan’s preferred pronouns before bringing xyr round to meet them, just like Danny did with you and Cas. You even write it down for them, just in case they forget._

_Fifty comes and goes for you and Cas, and you tease Sammy that it won’t be long for him. For Cas’s birthday, you give him fifty different seeds for the garden he has taken to tending, and for your birthday, he gives you a ring. A ring that promises the renewal of your vows for your Silver anniversary, which is only two years away. You try and have sex on the swing seat in the garden, amazed that neither of you had suggested it before, and end up laughing too hard to finish when it tips and you both fall ass-first onto the hard patio._

_After twenty-five years of marriage, you and Cas renew your vows. You love him even more, if possible._

_You love him so much you think you might combust, but Cas contains it in a kiss, one that is soft and sweet._

_You love him so much, and he loves you so much, and you both cry again, just like you did at your first wedding. He kisses your tears away, and you do the same for him._

_Your family claps and coos around you, and you both turn to face them, hand in hand, but their faces have turned indistinguishable, their claps white noise. The walls pulse, and you look to your husband for an answer but he’s gone, your hand cold, and there’s a beeping, and buzzing, and a white light beaming you up, and you’re caught in it as it raises you from the floor and_

It’s exactly like a scene from a movie.

The camera blinks, and slowly, the room comes into focus. Unlike a movie, there aren’t a hoard of people around you, which you’re grateful for if you’re honest, because you feel like crap, and like maybe something died in your mouth.

You can’t move yet, but that’s okay. You don’t much feel like moving. You just flick your eyes back and forth, figuring out your surroundings and what’s in your peripheral vision, but it hurts and feels as though the strings of your eyeballs are as tight as a piano’s.

With something you think might be an attempt at a frown, you wonder how you know that about piano strings, but it comes back to you almost instantaneously.

Cas would play the piano sometimes, and every year or so you would always open the door to the tuner, a guy who you never caught the name of, but knew as pretty cool. He had a mullet.

Wait...there’s something you’re forgetting, you can feel it, that uncomfortable sensation of doom creeping through your limbs and deeper through your pores and to your bones, and then it settles in your chest, a heavy weight, and you’re trying to remember what the hell it is you’ve forgotten, but no lightbulb appears above your head.

What does appear, though, is a woman in scrubs, who pops her spiky red head through the door opposite your bed. She calls something to someone else, and before you know it, the heaviness that was on your chest is now pulling at your tired eyes, drawing them down like the blinds in yours and Cas’s room. Cas couldn’t sleep unless it was pitch black.

Your sight is blurry when you open your eyes, but you’d know that figure anywhere. Your dry lips crack as they tug into a smile, and as you reach for Cas’s hand, it doesn’t hurt to breathe so much anymore.

“Hey,” you greet him. “How long you been sittin’ there?”

He doesn’t take your hand. Instead, he places your arm back on the bed, leaning just close enough for you to hook your misplaced arm around him, pull him closer, and kiss him on the forehead.

Cas stiffly draws back. “Since they brought you here, eleven months ago.”

You find the energy to whistle weakly. “I’ve been out for almost a year?”

“Yes.” He says nothing more, tells you nothing of what you’ve missed, gives nothing away regarding your family.

“Well ain’t you Mr. Chatterbox today,” you mutter.

Your eyes are slightly more in focus now, and you see him frown.

“Just kidding, just kidding,” you say as you stroke his arm. He’s wearing his trenchcoat, like usual, and the simple motion on the nice material is soothing enough for you to momentarily take a nap. You feel safe, though you can’t remember why you’re in hospital, because you’re with your husband, and that’s how it should be.

Something cold on your lips startles you awake. You try to sit up so you can fight the danger, but wires stop you from doing so and jerk you backwards so you’re horizontal again, only this time with a bitch of a headache. Well, even _more_ of a bitch of a headache.

Cas’s hands are up in some sort of gesture of surrender, and his eyes are wide with panic.

“My apologies,” he says, keeping his distance. “Your lips were cracked, so I thought water might help.”

You smile then, uncaring of the deepening cracks. Cas is worth them. “Aww, you’re too good to me. But they do kinda hurt, so can you”—a dry cough breaks through your words and racks your body—“can you do it again?”

Actually everything kinda hurts, but that’s part and parcel of being hooked up to about a million machines.

There’s something you know you’re missing as you stare at Castiel, but his wet finger on your lips distracts you, and you forget that you’re forgetting something.

“I could just heal you,” he says pointedly, and _that’s it._ This Cas is an angel, but you don’t call him Cas, and if you don’t call him Cas, then that means—

“We’re not married.”

“No, we’re not,” he confirms, puzzled.

If everything kinda hurt before, then you’re in agony now. The machines go crazy with beeping and buzzing, and it’s just like what you heard at the vow renewal ceremony, and that’s when you realise that it was all a dream. A coma dream, at that, if Cas – _Castiel_ has been sitting by your side for nearly a year. And this world isn’t real either. And – shit. The apocalypse.

The beeps and buzzes amplify and speed up, and you can hear footsteps in the hallway and chatter about a code, and then Cas's voice breaks through it and he's only calling your name but it worsens the pain. Then, fingertips brush your forehead, and you're asleep again.

Those fingertips are resting on your hand now, so you flip your palm up and give them a squeeze.

"Hello, Dean."

"Hey."

You look at each other for a long moment. There's relief in his eyes, but also concern, and fatigue hides in them. Angels don't need sleep, but you think Castiel could do with some right now. Either that or a hug. Your Cas always wanted cuddles when he was tired. You rub your thumb over the backs of his fingers and hope that it brings him some comfort, if sleep can't. He gives you an odd look, but does not rescind his hand from yours.

"You gave us 'quite the scare'," he says, and you can tell that he's repeating the nurses’ words verbatim, and you bark a weak laugh.

"Sorry 'bout that," you softly reply, squeezing his hand once more.

Then out of left field, he hovers his other hand over your head, and almost begs, "Let me heal you."

You bat his hand away. "Why're you so keen to heal me now?"

Maybe he just wants an excuse to touch you. Or at least that's what a small but mighty voice is saying in your head, though you know you can never trust that voice.

"I don't like seeing you hurt."

He sounds so honest, and this time he squeezes your hand, and you don't think that he means to do it but he uses his angel mojo to put you to sleep again. Yeah, because you haven't done enough of that.

 

Castiel is fussing over you in his restrained way when you open your eyes, and he apologises as soon as he realises that you're awake.

"Your mother will be here soon," he tells you. "I expect you would prefer for me to leave whilst she visits?"

You nod, and suddenly a thought crosses your mind.

"Hey,” you croak, “you could’a healed me when I was in that coma. Why didn’t you?”

You gesture for the glass of water on the side as Cas presses his lips together. He passes you it, and you take a glorious gulp of the finest and most refreshing water you have ever tasted, and this is coming from the guy who doesn’t even _like_ water.

“The Djinn was regulating your coma. I think he knows that something is interfering with your mind, but he doesn’t quite know what, so he put you under two layers of unconsciousness. One layer, I can penetrate easily, but two...it’s slightly more difficult.”

Cas is scowling now, like he used to when you made cottage pie without baked beans ( _‘no one likes frickin’_ baked beans _in cottage pie, Cas, why would you do that to a perfectly good meal?’_ ), but you mentally shake that from your mind, because now you know that this is not the guy you fell in love with in your second dreamworld.

 _It’s the guy you fell in love with from the first,_ something whispers in its place, and _woah_ where did that come from? Because you are totally not in love with this Castiel, no way. This guy’s squint isn’t quite as cute, and his hands refuse to skirt over your body for no reason, and his eyes have a different kind of intensity, and he is far too stoic overall for you to ever be in love with him.

But he’s scowling, and your heart is fluttering, and you want to soothe it from his features with a loving thumb, so you do what you do when you’re scared; you ignore it completely.

“Heh. Dream layers. They should make some kinda movie about that. Like, going between layers and one being longer ‘cause, you know, I had a whole lifetime in there.”

Castiel blinks, and the scowl is gone. He’s just looking at you now, like your still-a-little-high rambling matters.

You miss him. Dream-him. And it hurts to look at the real thing and know that you can never have the apple pie life with him, but it’s confusing your muddled mind more because you know it’s not your Cas, it’s the angel Castiel, and you don’t really want to kiss the angel Castiel and have sex on the garden swing, but you also kinda do. In short: you’re tired and confused and seeing him makes your chest ache.

“You’re tired,” he says finitely, and you frown.

“Did you just read my mind?” you ask, your heart beating quickly for different, panicked reasons now.

Castiel shakes his head. “You exude exhaustion, Dean, I do not have to read your mind to know that you need rest.”

Your pulse settles. You close your eyes for a few long moments, and it satisfies the crap out of you. Your body grows heavier with each breath out, and in the air you feel something building, which means that Castiel is probably going to leave soon. Without permission, your hand shoots out and grabs a handful of his trenchcoat.

“Don’t go,” you murmur. The trenchcoat does not flap, tug, or disappear from your grasp, so you allow your lips to curl into a relieved smile, and rest.

You wish you could stop loving him.

They've heightened the level of your morphine supply after the scare you gave them, and it only kicks in after your mom's gone. Cas is back, and you're sad that Mom's gone home because you want her to meet your hubby.

“It was perfect, Cas,” you sleepily mumble. “It was just you ‘n’ me, no apocalypse, no being righteous or angelic...just you ‘n’ me, married.” You giggle, all lightheaded from the drugs or from the high of remembered domesticity. “Can you believe that? Us. _Married._ We even had a kid: Danny.”

Cas smiles with the corner of his mouth, and you know from years of studying that particular smile that that means he loves you. Leaning into the fingers you directed stroking through your hair, you close your eyes and wait to fall in a less permanent sleep, this time. But just before you drift away on drugged dreams, you frown for a moment, and try to lift your head to see your husband better.

“When I was out...you coulda pulled the plug. Killed me. In this world, I mean. Why didn’t you?”

“I want that to be your decision,” he says softly, teasing the hairs on your head that have grown long with neglect. He lightly pushes your head back down, soothing the strain in your neck with a thumb, and looks at you like he did when you cut your hand slicing carrots.

You huff out a laugh as you force yourself back to the present. “Yeah right, I know you...You prolly tried and couldn’t bring yourself to. I know you, Cas. You love me too much.”

Cas says something as your burning eyes flutter and close, but you don’t hear it, too preoccupied with whatever’s lulling you to sleep.

He’s gone when you wake up again. This time, you’re determined to stay conscious for as long as possible, even if the doctors say you need rest. Carmen’s visiting you soon, you know that much because mom told you so yesterday, or earlier, or whenever she came. You’re losing time, sleeping through days, and it’s not good. Castiel is itching whenever he thinks you’re not looking at him, itching to get you out. You’d let him do it – kill you, that is, but he seems hell bent (or is that heaven bent?) on you killing yourself. Strange, considering the Bible’s views on suicide.

But apparently you’re going to Hell anyway, so killing yourself in a world made from your wish is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Oh yes, the grand scheme. You almost forgot about that. The great plan of God’s in which you, the supposedly _Righteous Man_ , do something in Hell, and light the match on the apocalypse.

You can feel your mouth hardening in that self-hating downturn you’ve looked away from in the mirror one too many times, but you manage to turn it around when that cute nurse comes in. Klara, her badge says, and she’s got bright blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses and a dark bob that’s just a little frazzled from a long night.

“Hey, Klara,” you say wearily, though you feel bad for sounding tired when she’s obviously been on call.

“Well look who’s up and awake!”

She smiles just for you, like you’re smiling just for her. Cas would probably wax philosophical about humans and the power of their smiles at this moment, and you’d probably roll your eyes with a contained smile.

“What’re you smiling at?” Klara asks, helping you sit upright.

“Oh, just you, sweetheart,” you deflect, “can’t see that face and not smile.”

Yeah, you’ve still got it.

She huffs a laugh. “Ever the charmer, Dean.” Then, with a knowing smile, she says, “A little birdie told me that your girlfriend is visiting today. Oh a scale of ‘...eh’ to ‘woo!’ how excited are you?”

“My _girlfriend_ ,” you scoff, only rolling your eyes at her tiny fists punching the air. “It sounds like I’m in middle school.”

"What is she, then? Your partner?”

You hold yourself upright while she plumps your pillows, and think about it. What is Carmen, apart from the woman who was literally made for you? She’s not quite your girlfriend, not quite your partner, so what do you call her?

“She’s my girl,” you supply.

Klara grins and teases, “I had no idea you’d been in a coma since the fifties! I hope your greaser jacket still fits.”

You grin back and let her do everything she needs to. She checks the clipboard at the end of your bed and makes what you assume to be notes about your recovery and medication dosage, and with a final pat on your chest, Klara leaves to attend to her other patients. The smile slips off your face as soon as she’s gone.

Switching on the TV, you wonder what time Carmen’s coming today, and if Castiel will appear to fill that gap. You hope he does. Your chest hurts more when he’s away than when he’s here, absence making the heart grow fonder and all that, but you think that you’re slowly but surely getting over him. Not that it’s really him that you’re getting over, but whatever.

Carmen visits a couple of hours later, and it’s...nice. It’s different, but it’s nice, you guess. She talks about the job she took at the neighbouring hospital, how she’s been, which of her friends have gotten hitched or pregnant or broken up, and what your family’s been up to. She touches your arm and keeps her hand here while she talks, and kisses your forehead when she goes, but it feels wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Like you’re cheating on Cas, which is ridiculous, because you’re not even fucking _married_ to him for Christ’s sakes, so why—

Castiel flies into the chair Carmen just vacated, and you hate yourself for melting at the sight of him.

“I really hate you, you know that?” you murmur without malice.

He just looks at you, and it makes you not-hate him more.

“I would rather you didn’t hate me, but I suppose you have reason. I am not the man you fell in love with, but he has my face, my name, my everything, so I can understand why that would be difficult for you.”

“Can you?”

Castiel glances down almost sheepishly. “I suppose not.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and as soon as you unmute the TV, Castiel mutes it again with his angel powers.

“I could – I could help _ease_ the transition, if you’re having difficulties,” he says awkwardly and never meeting your eyes.

“What transition?”

“Mine. The way you see me. I – the me you dreamt of, he was your husband for longer than I have been your guardian. It’s perfectly natural to be confused.”

You stare at him. “Woah, what are you saying?”

He still won’t look at you. “That I could be your...that I could wean you off the idea of me as your husband.”

“Like a heroin baby?”

"A what?"

"You think I need to be _weaned_ off you like I'm some kinda heroin baby?" you ask incredulously.

"I – I don't understand. What's a heroin baby?"

"A heroin baby. You know, like when the mom's on heroin while she's pregnant, then the baby comes out addicted too?"

"Are you saying that your mother is addicted to heroin?"

"No! Jesus Christ, Cas,” you huff. “I'm a big boy. I don't need you to hold my hand and act like every day's frickin' _Valentine’s Day_ until I get over my stupid coma dream, I need you to act like yourself so I remember that you and _my_ Cas are nothing alike."

His eyelids flicker but he never quite blinks. "All right," he stiffly replies.

Staring ahead at a fixed point, Castiel’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t un-mute the TV, and he doesn’t un-mute himself.

You try to make conversation in the jilted silence. "Anyway, isn't it against the Bible or something to lay with another man or whatever?"

Castiel’s answer is resolute and throw-away. "God is indifferent to sexual orientation."

"Huh." You guess the translations were wrong, then. Either that, or God’s had a come-to-God moment since his original views. Can God have a come-to-God moment? Or did he just see a dick and think, _‘ Hell yeah, I knew there was a reason I put the male G-spot in the butt’_?

Being awake is taking its toll on your reasoning, and another example of this is when you grunt:

"Maybe you can hold my hand. But only til I get discharged, okay?"

Castiel only nods once, with the tiniest of smiles, and clinically places his hand on top of yours. You sigh and hold it right, palm to palm, fingers interlocking.

The angel still doesn’t talk. He seems content to sit in silence, the only sign of his presence the warmth in your hand. It was like that before, too. Cas would go out of his way to hold your hand no matter how awkward the position whatever he was doing, be it reading a book, eating, or having sex. Whatever the weather, Cas’s hand would seek yours out. It was an integral part of how you realised you were in love with him.

One day, you were by the side of a road, fixing Baby up, and he would not let go of your hand.

 

 _“ Cas, I’m trying to get us back on the road, here,”_ you said.

 _“ But I want to hold your hand,”_ he’d replied. _“_ _Can’t you work one-handed?”_

You’d scoffed then, but gave it a go. _“ Needy son of a bitch,”_ you had muttered, pressing a greasy kiss to his forehead and squeezing his hand.

It was when you tried to replace the spark plug that you failed completely, and instead of getting mad, you couldn’t stop giggling.

 _“ What?”_ Cas asked, still gripping your hand though you were bent over.

 _“ You!_ ” you had managed to say in a contained laugh. _“ I love you so damn much that I’m tryin’a replace Baby’s spark plug left handed!”_

 _“ Oh.”_ Cas dropped your hand in surprise, his face slack.

You had stopped laughing then. With a swallow, you nervously said, _“ Forget I said anything. It’s too early, and—”_

 _“ And I love you too,”_ said Cas, fiercely. He took hold of both your hands, uncaring of the grime, and kissed you firmly on the mouth. A smudge jumped from your nose to his, and when you saw it you loved him more.

 

That reminds you.

“How do I look? From the outside, in the real world?”

Castiel’s whole demeanour darkens, and his fingers try to pry themselves from yours.  “I do not wish to answer that.”

Your eyebrows draw together. “Why? Do I look that bad?”

It’s said mostly in jest, but the angel refuses to meet your gaze, and his hand is still trying to part ways with yours. He looks like you’ve just plunked him in the middle of a brothel with a rubber and a fifty, and as though his vessel ate pink chicken at a meal beforehand.

And that’s when you panic.

“Hey! Tell me!”

The monitor next to you spikes like it’s moonlighting as a richter scale, and you have to forcibly slow your heart rate so the nurses don’t come rushing in.

Castiel stares at you, as indecipherable as the Zodiac killer’s codes. Although, you know that the Zodiac killer was really a previous vessel of a high-ranking demon, and that his codes were easily cracked by you and Sammy under Bobby’s gruff tuition.

“You’re dying, Dean,” he says quietly. “Your lips are blue because your lungs are struggling to take in oxygen, your shoulders are slowly dislocating from the way your wrists are hung, and your skin is pallid because the life is being drained out of you.*

“So, handsome as usual.”

He doesn’t laugh, which doesn’t surprise you, but you manage a grin anyway.

“It has to be soon, Dean,” he says gravely, and then he’s gone again.

That doesn’t surprise you either.

As it turns out, you have to go through a bout of physical therapy sessions, just to make sure you can walk okay. Both your motor and sensory systems are working fine, as proven by a few tests they ran on you a couple of days ago, but apparently not moving independently for almost a year warrants walking lessons.

“I’ll be fine,” you say to Klara, who’s wheeling you to the ‘gym’, “just let me outta this damn chair and I’ll walk. I’ll even skip, if that’s what it takes.”

She giggles behind you and flicks your ear (which you’re sure is some kind of illegal, but this isn’t real anyway, so you don’t bother to entertain even the thought of suing your wonderful nurse). “You didn’t complain nearly as much about these sessions when you were unconscious.”

“I thought you were meant to be a nurse, not a comedian,” you grumble.

“What can I say, the crippling debt was too tempting.”

You snort at her dry reply, and begrudgingly let her push you around. Not that you have much choice in the matter.

Physical therapy starts with a body massage, one you enjoy a little too much (hey, the only thing you have that compares to the bliss of a full body massage is Magic Finger beds at not-that-awful-but-not-that-fancy motels, and when Sam wasn’t around you’d go to town on your dick after slotting in a quarter), and then the doctor puts you on a treadmill to stretch your legs. You only walk, but after a minute or so, your legs turn to jelly, and you have to take a break.

“You did well,” the doctor says encouragingly. “Most in your condition can only walk for half of what you did.”

A sense of pride swells in your chest and fills the emptiness Cas has left, because you’re _Dean Winchester_ and of course you’re stronger than the average person. If you’re strong enough to withstand a couple of minutes of ambling, then surely you’re strong enough to repair your heart.

Yeah. If you can walk now, you can run soon, and if your heart is struggling to beat now, it’ll be able to race again soon enough.

It’s just a matter of time. And you have plenty of that.

It strikes you when you’re able to run again.

You don’t _have_ to wait for your heart to catch up. You could just kill yourself and wake up in a world where you didn’t ever fall in love with Castiel, and where you’ll never be in danger of falling in love with him. You could throw yourself off the top of the hospital, and live in a place where you don’t hate him for not reciprocating your imaginary feelings. You could meet him in Hell, and be none the wiser that you ever made love to him a thousand times.

You bring the topic up—vaguely of course—with Mom when she visits next, and talk around it at length. It all boils down to the last sentence of the whole convoluted mess, which you manage to get out after huffing and puffing and starting over again and again.

“So, if Dad forgot you, but you still loved him, but it wasn’t _really_ real anyway, what would you do?”

She stares at you for a second before breaking into pretty laughter. “Dean, honey, I have no idea what you just asked me, or even what this is about, but I don’t think you can explain, can you?”

You shake your head.

“Okay…” Mom thinks hard for a second, and tries, “So if your father rose from the dead, but had no memory of our time together, and had reverted back to the man he was when I met him—which I _think_ is what you’re asking—would I try to woo him again?”

You nod eagerly, glad she’s understood something from your rambling.

A smile blooms on her lips. “I think I would. If he was worth it the first time, he’ll be more than worth it the second.”

You say your thanks, and decide to stay just a little longer, to see if Castiel will be worth the Cas.

You don’t think about how you’re going to forget him anyway.

“...and then we’ll have one of the dinners that’s in your recipe booklet, to keep up your strength, and every night we’ll do your stretches until the doctor is happy with your muscles, and then we need to make sure you don’t sleep for too long, just in case—”

“Just in case I magically fall into a coma again.” You roll your eyes like a teenager, though you know Carmen is only looking out for you. “I’m fine, Car,” you tell her. “All my injuries from the accident healed, and my cognitive skills are fine too. I don’t know how, but I am _fine._ ”

She slows the Impala (which you’re not allowed to drive thanks to a stupid coma and a concerned girlfriend) to a stop at the side of the road, and takes her hands off the wheel to put her face in them.

“I just – it was – you were – _eleven months_ , Dean, and we didn’t know if you were going to pull through, and you squeezed everyone’s hand but _mine_ , even Sam’s kids’, and I’m just so worried and I know you think you’re fine but that could change at any time, and…” Carmen sniffs and catches her tears on her fingertips before they fall, shaking them off as she looks at you with red velvet eyes. “I just love you so much, and I – I kept wondering why you wouldn’t squeeze my hand.”

God, she looks so damn sad, and your chests pangs just seeing it. The way she’s pouting so her lips don’t wobble, the way she keeps running a finger under each eye so her make up doesn’t smudge, the way her voice is tightly wound and wounded like a dying animal’s...it’s too much, so you take her hand and squeeze it. It’s the best you can do for now.

She laughs bitterly. “You know, I thought it would wake you up, for a few, stupid seconds. Me being there. Me holding your hand and kissing you and talking to you. Because Johnny and Erica kept watching all these Disney movies, and I got it in my head that true love healed everything in real life, too. But it didn’t. It doesn’t.”

Carmen’s voice breaks completely, and she forgets to wipe away the threat of tears. They roll down her cheeks, tracking a path in her foundation, and drip on her shirt. You unbuckle her seatbelt and pull her toward you. The tears are dripping on your shirt now, but the dampness on your collarbone doesn’t matter. Carmen matters.

You kiss her on the forehead and hold her tight as she tries to control her sobs.

“A-and I kept thinking, is it because he hasn’t known me his whole life? Am I not family yet? Or does he just – does he just n-not love me enough? Am I not enough for y-you, Dean?”

“Hey, hey, don’t talk like that,” you soothe. “Of course you’re enough for me. And you’ve been family from the moment I realised that you loved me for all the things that make me annoying as the frickin’ Crazy Frog. I don’t know why I didn’t squeeze your hand, but I’m doing it now, and isn’t that what’s important?” You gently cup her cheeks and pull her away from your shoulder, and duck so your eyes are level. “I love you, and coma-me is a jerk for not squeezing back. I love you, y‘hear?”

Your voice is so fierce you almost convince yourself.

She nods in your palms, and you pull her to your chest again, whispering _I love you I love you I love you_ until your t-shirt starts to dry.

“You’re my girl, don’t you ever forget that,” you tell her, soaking up the dewed tears on her lips with your mouth.

You wish you could forget that Cas was ever your man.

“Tell me how we met,” you find yourself saying to Carmen one night, as she’s just settled into spooning you.

“You don’t remember?”

The steady beat her heart was drumming against your chest stills instantly, and you can hear the frown on her face.

“Course I remember,” you bluff convincingly, “I just wanted to hear it from your side. If you thought I was adorable before you even started talking to me, or whatever. That kinda thing.”

Carmen’s relieved sigh warms your neck, and her fingers trail up from your middle to your chest as she says, “Thank God, I thought you were suffering from delayed amnesia or something. Okay, so how we first met.” A smile lightens her voice. “Me and Sunny were going out for drinks, and she wanted to go home with someone she would never see again after the next morning, so we found the dirtiest dive we could, and got in with minimal flirting. Minimal flirting! We couldn’t believe it. Anyway, so we walked in, and she checks out all the guys in the bar, and all the guys in the bar were checking her out, including you. And, God, you were so hot, baby. You were wearing this grey henley with this red shirt, and you were wiggling your ass in your tight jeans as you were playing pool, and everyone else was checking you out, too, so I never even dreamed you’d look twice at me.”

Is she kidding? All this time, you’ve been considering yourself lucky to stand a chance with Carmen, and now you’ve found out that it’s the other way around? You knew she loved you, but like you do, you doubt the love everyone has for you. You doubted her love, and didn’t know she was doing the same until after the accident.

“So Sunny walks up to you, and she—” Carmen breaks off to laugh, and you huff a laugh along with her. “She _licks_ your ear, and you made the weirdest face and missed the ball, and I remember thinking that you were the cutest and funniest thing that I’d seen in months.”

“And the hottest,” you cut in.

“And the hottest,” she agrees. “So you shrug Sunny off, look at me laughing, and...you changed. Just the whole of you, you changed. You weren’t this cocky pretty-boy anymore. You looked at me laughing, and you blushed, and you tried to change back by winking at me, but you just gave me this weird, seductive blink instead, and I laughed again. By then, Sunny was off macking on another guy, and when she gave me the signal that _that_ was the guy and left, I went to leave too.”

You shift in Carmen’s arms to face her and tangle your feet together. You stroke her hair out of her face, rub the small of her back with your knuckles, and ask, “What happened then?”

She smiles shyly. “You stopped me and said, _what, you’re gonna make like a tree without climbing me like one?_ And I rolled my eyes, and said that I was, and you tried to be all _whatever_ about it, but I knew better than that. I told you that I would consider climbing you like a tree if you told me a secret, and you know what you told me?”

“What?”

“You told me that you were wearing your lucky panties. Pink, satiny ones.”

A bright red blush covers you from head to toe in an instant.

Lucky pant _ies_. Implying you have more than one pair. You want to slap your forehead when you realise why those panties you thought were Carmen’s keep migrating to your drawer.

“You looked exactly like that, too!” she exclaims, beaming. “So handsome, and cute, and precious, and gorgeous, and I just wanted to take you home and do the naughtiest things to you and eat pancakes off you in the morning.”

You raise your eyebrows at her closed-eye shudder.

Her dainty hand sounds a hard slap as your nipple stings.

“Hey! I never wanted to eat pancakes off anyone else before! Just you. And I did,” Carmen smugly adds.

Pouting, you rub your chest. “I can’t believe you slapped my nipple,” you mumble woundedly.

She kisses the red fingerprints, and laves her tongue around the offended nipple.

“You judged me for wanting to eat pancakes off you,” she says between sucks. “I don’t know why, you enjoyed it the next morning.”

You want to suggest eating pancakes off each other again, but the words get stuck in your mouth as though your spit has turned into super-glue.

You’re not ready. You’re not there yet. You’re stuck on a crumbling bridge, with Carmen beneath you, beckoning you into the waters you can’t swim in, Cas on the side you can’t get back to at all, despondent and resigned, and then there’s Castiel on the side you could make if you tried, his arms outstretched.

The cobbles beneath you won’t hold out forever, but eventually you have to make a choice.

Do you drown, or do you leap?

Sam and Jess bring the kids round when you’re feeling up to having more people visit (read: when Carmen says that you’re feeling up to having more people visit), and Johnny and Erica manage to bruise you with their hugs.

“Now tell me,” you say seriously, “which one is which? I was out so long, I forgot!”

Erica giggles her dainty little giggle while Johnny’s jaw drops.

“I’m Johnny, and she’s Erica! O’viously!”

“O’viously!” Erica chimes in, and you can’t help but laugh at their petulant pouts.

“They’re little you’s!” you exclaim, pointing at Sam and laughing more when his expression matches theirs.

Jess giggles behind her hand and nods. “The only thing they get from me is their curls,” she says, lovingly grabbing a handful of each of the twin’s hair and springing the spirals.

They’re like puppies, really. Johnny and Erica aren’t identical, but they both have darkening blonde curls, polished hazel eyes, and wiggly little excited bodies that beg to be let up on the furniture. They almost make you imagine what your own kids would be like.

But that’s never a thought you stay on for too long, because you were on the other side of the phone singing lullabies to gurgly babies when Sam had fallen asleep both talking to you and singing to them. You were the one who Jess complained to about smelling of puke every day. You were the one who was on the receiving end of tired looks and _‘ don’t ever have kids, Dean’_ s. Plus, having kids means adopting, something you and Carmen probably wouldn’t be approved for based on your work schedules alone, never mind the fact that having a kid would mean moving to a bigger place.

Kids aren’t for you. That was decided for you by the Djinn (or by your subconscious, though you like to suppress that), and it’s not like you’re _that_ eager to hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

Besides, you already raised Daniel, so you’ve been there, done that, and got the puke-stained t-shirt.

Jess takes the twins into the kitchen when Carmen suggests baking a surprise for Uncle Dean, leaving you with Sam. His leg is bouncing up and down as he sits awkwardly on your normal-sized furniture (the furniture in the Winchester-Moore’s residence is fit for Amazons), practically vibrating the whole apartment. You shoot a hand out to catch his knee, and shoot a questioning glance at him.

“Sorry,” Sam says, setting his foot firmly on the floor. “I’m just...nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous?”

“Yeah!” he defensively retorts.

You scoff and open your palms in a static shrug.  “Why? I’m fine.”

“I know you’re _fine_ , Dean, you always are.” You don’t know whether that’s meant to be a dig or a compliment, so you let him continue. “It’s only that...well, you were out for a long time, almost a year, and I don’t know whether the Dean who comes back was gonna be the Dean who snaked my ATM card or the Dean who...I actually like and respect.”

“That’s it? That’s what you’re nervous about? Jeez, Sammy, it’s _me_ , okay? The Dean you ‘actually like and respect.’”

“Really?”

“Really. Now come over here so I can hug you all manly and respectable.”

He helps you to your feet to you can envelop him in a hug, and pulls the bitchiest of all bitch faces when you grin and wave his wallet in front of him.

“Bad joke?” you ask with a nervous laugh, but Sam only responds by tackling you.

You wrestle around, bunching up the rug and knocking over the floor lamp, and only stop when you’re sat on top of him, pinning him just like when you first told him Dad was missing.

“Pinned by a man who just got out of a coma!” you crow to the world. In the direction of the kitchen, you gloat, “You hear that kids? Your daddy might be tall and all that shit, but he got beat by a man in physical therapy!”

Sam’s been laughing ever since you used _tickle_ as a weapon, and admonishes between gasps for breath, “You...can’t say... _shit..._ in front of my kids!”

“Sorry! Uncle Dean meant to say ‘stuff’!” you call apologetically, but the kitchen doesn’t seem to have heard anything going on in the lounge.

And by the looks of the kitchen after they present you with badly-iced cupcakes, it’s no wonder.

 _I only cleaned in here this morning,_ you whine to yourself.

Though the cupcakes look sweet, with iced letters spelling  G E T  W E L L  S O O N  U N C L E  D E A N, they are shockingly salty, and only find out why when Johnny and Erica let you in on a secret.

 _“ We switched the salt and the sugar,_ ” they tell you in stage whispers behind tiny hands. You high-five them both, and chuckle and cuddle them on your lap. Pranking at eight years old. You couldn’t have asked for a better niece and nephew.

Mom visits a little later when Sam and Jess have taken the twins home to clean cake mix out of every crevice they have, and you slide her a cupcake to have with the coffee Carmen poured.

To her credit, she swallows the whole first bite and smiles painfully. It’s probably not the first time she’s had a salty cake, what with you being the troublemaker you were. You laugh and tell her of the twins’ evil plan, and she laughs too, and Carmen laughs along, and why the hell would you ever want to leave this place? You’ve laughed more here in a day than you probably have in a year in your real life, and the warmth in your stomach is too addicting to leave. You’re home.

Sammy and the Impala used to be your home, but Sam’s never really needed you as much as you’ve needed him. You’re not home for Sam. Maybe once you were, when he was a kid and he didn’t know any better, but now he’s an adult. He went to college. He had a group of friends. He got a girlfriend and lived with her. He had a life outside of you, something you’ve never quite managed with the tables turned.

You’ve got a while ‘til you die, yet, maybe twenty years. And maybe you’ll just let it happen. Maybe you’ll keep fobbing Castiel off with _soons_ and _I promise I wills_ , and maybe you’ll die here instead of outside. For all you know, Sam dies because of something you’ve done in the real world, and maybe you’re doing him a favour by staying here.

You love him, but you have to let him go. You understand, now. You understand that to help Sammy, you have to stay here, and die of domesticity. It’s what he would want for you.

Dying of old age never sounded so good.

You’re woken by the rain lashing against the window and flash lightning whiting out your dreams. You toss and turn and are even spooned by Carmen, but you can’t get back to sleep. She groans as you leave the bed, so you smooth her hair and whisper, “Just getting some water, baby.”

That seems to satisfy her, so you go about your water-getting. You reach for a cup in the glass cabinet, and almost drop it when shutting the door reveals a figure.

“Don’t do that!” you angrily breathe.

Castiel pushes you against the counter, and you pucker up for a second before remembering that you’re not in for rough midnight sex. You’re in for a rough midnight lecture.

“What are you still doing here? And why are your thoughts insinuating that they are going to stay here?”

You want to yell at him for reading your mind, but keep it in for the sake of the sleeping Carmen.

“Maybe ‘cause I am,” you say, testy.

He looks at you disapprovingly, like the time Danny got detention and you high-fived him. In Danny’s and your defence, the boy who got punched was asking for it by following your son around all day and asking him about his ‘real’ parents, which of his dads were the mommy, and how his dads got stuck with a kid who wasn’t even the same colour as them.

 _There is no excuse for violence,_ Cas had said, and you sighed and agreed.

You won’t be sighing and agreeing this time.

“Look, I’m sorry—actually, I’m not—but you’re gonna have to find another righteous man. There’s gotta be a ton of good guys in Hell waiting to kickstart the apocalypse.”

“We are not having this conversation again, Dean. There aren’t. There is only you, and it _must_ be you, along with Sam and I.” Castiel leans against the counter, his elbows knocking the toaster and the bread bin, and shakes his head as he drops your gaze. “What could I do? To convince you? To bring you out of this?”

“You could kiss my ass.”

Deep lines furrow his brow. “I...could do that, if that is your only requirement.”

Only for half a moment do you entertain that thought.

“I’m kidding, Cas. It’s just a phrase. It means...lotsa different things now I come to think of it...but yeah. I ain’t comin’ out. Of this dream, I mean,” you hastily add.

“There must be something I can do.” Castiel is almost pleading with you – in fear of being disciplined again, you think, and guilt pulls on your guts.

He’s an angel. He’ll survive. He’ll find another dude in Hell, and save him, and you and Sam will be death and apocalypse-free.

But it’s not that simple, is it? There’s something the angels aren’t telling Castiel, you know that much. A piece missing from the puzzle. A string yet to be placed on the board.

“Anything, Dean,” says Castiel earnestly and quietly, and the defeat nearing his irises is too much to bear looking at.

 _You could suck my dick_ is on the tip of your tongue, but you would definitely entertain that thought for more than half a moment. And you might actually let him.

You shake your head. “‘Fraid not, man.”

He stands upright in an instant and invades your personal space, though it doesn’t feel much like an invasion anymore. Not since you were married, anyway. It’s more like dancing around each other again, waiting for the other to make the first move. That was just for the first date, though, and Cas made the first move.

Castiel makes the first move again.

He shoves you up against the fridge, more violently than he did upon his entrance, his lips almost on your jaw and his fists bunched in your pyjama shirt. It’s as though Castiel has magnets on each of his knuckles, and they’re trying to push through your body to attach you to the fridge like you’re some picture drawn by Erica.

You groan through your teeth as Castiel lifts you so far off the ground you’re just about ready to start Pointe, and he’s got that determined glint in his eye again. The last time you saw that, he telekinetically held a meat cleaver to your throat.

“You think you are so important as to throw aside God’s plan for you?” he seethes. “I should have killed you _years ago_ , before you had the chance to – the chance to…”

“The chance to what, Cas? To poison you? ‘Cause that’s what I do. I’m poison,” you choke.

Castiel sags, and takes you with him. “No, Dean,” he says, his hands still in your shirt and his sad eyes on you, “you aren’t poison. You are a good man. You’ve seen the world, the state in which it’s become. Trust me when I tell you that it will only get worse. We need a man like you. A good man. A righteous man.”

His hand travels up to ghost the jaw his lips were nearly kissing, and before flying away, Castiel says, “I hope you are well.”

You are not well.

Carmen’s kissing you. On the mouth. For the first time since before you were in a coma.

Her lips are too supple, her face too soft, her hands too dainty, and it’s _wrongwrongwrong._

But she’s your girl, and she’s waited for you. Carmen could have had any guy she wanted in the time you were in hospital, but she didn’t. She wants you and _loves_ you, of all things, though you can’t understand why, and you owe it to her to try to want her and love her back.

Her hand slides down to unbutton your pants, and you hope to God she doesn’t mind that you’re not hard yet.

“A little shy, are we?” Carmen purrs in your ear, before placing a kiss on your lips and working her way down your naked torso. She makes a pitstop at both your nipples, and that draws a small twitch from your dick.

Your stomach is next to be kissed. It’s lost all definition and is soft from laying in a bed for eleven months, but she doesn’t seem to care. Carmen pets and strokes it as though it were the family dog, and moves on quickly as though the dog were sporting a muzzle.

She cups your balls as she flicks her tongue around your slowly-hardening cock, and tugs on them when she engulfs it in the heat of her mouth. You groan then, and her big brown eyes smile smugly as they pin you. A swallow coaxes a full erection out of you, as well as a choke. It’s been so long since you came, so long since you had a woman to come in, and the long hair in your fingers feels foreign. Alien. It’s unfamiliar, though you’ve combed your fingers through the sooty silk a hundred times before. You lose yourself in Carmen’s mouth and Carmen’s hands and Carmen’s hair through pure will.

You owe her this.

You come in her mouth with a shout, and she swallows around you for the last time.

She thumbs the corners of her lips, and swipes her chin with the side of her hand. She doesn’t kiss or cuddle you while you come down. Where her big brown eyes were smiling before, they’re full of sadness and disappointment; not a smile in sight.

“Dean?” she starts quietly, sitting up. “Who’s Cas?”

Your heart stops.

“What?”

“Cas. That’s what you said just now.”

You rack your memory. Did you really shout Cas’s name as you came? You can’t have. You don’t even like him that way.

“No, I said…I said…”

“You said Cas,” Carmen says. She swallows, her throat thick from a lump and your come, and touches your hand.

Shaking your head firmly, you protest, “No, Car, I promise, I don’t even _know_ anyone called Cas!”

“I know when you’re lying, Dean! You lied to me before the accident, and you’re lying to me now.” Her voice is raised and highly strung, and you can’t argue with it. She’s completely right.

You wipe your hands down your face, honesty following the tips of your fingers, and create a cage for your mouth to confess through.

“After the accident, when I was in that coma...I was dreaming the entire time. I dreamed a whole other life, Car, and you...and you weren’t there. We weren’t together there. Instead, it was me and someone else, this – this _guy._ ”

“Cas?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. And we were married and everything. About to renew our vows when I woke up.”

Carmen thinks for a moment. “So you’re not...cheating on me?”

You dredge a laugh from somewhere deep in your hollow gut. “Sweetheart, I’ve just got out of hospital, where I didn’t get a _single_ boner because the smell shrivelled my little guy, and I was in a coma before that. So no, I’m not cheating on you.”

She breathes a tiny _phew_ , and you pull her up for a short peck on the lips. Carmen snuggles into the crook of your arm, settling down for the night, but your mind won’t rest. One question has been swirling around and around like a shit in a clogged toilet, and you can’t seem to find the plunger.

“So…Eleven months, huh? How did you – did you – you didn’t – uhh...how do I say this…”

“I waited for you, Dean honey,” she yawns, and you want to hit yourself.

Of _course_ she waited for you. Carmen’s your dream girl. But that reminder doesn’t give your stomach a buoyancy aid, it doesn’t even throw an inflatable armband to it.

You just wanted her to be imperfect for once, to give you a chance to overreact and maybe break up with her.

“We’ll figure it out in the morning,” says Carmen, her voice muffled by your shoulder. “Us, and what we’re going to do about Cas.”

“Okay,” you say back, though it’s purely lip-service.

There’s nothing to figure out. You’re going to forget you were ever in love with Cas, and that’s that.  

“Cas, did anything I taught you about the dishwasher go in that bird-brain of yours, or do you just like to piss me off?”

Carmen gives you a funny look—funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha—and presses the ‘start’ button on the thing.

“It’s okay,” she reassures as your stricken face is reflected in the fridge, “you’re getting there. I promise.”

It’s the third time you’ve called her Cas this week, and that’s not counting the times you caught yourself before you said his name. Little things will set you switching universes, rendering you completely unable to distinguish your lives from one another. You suppose it was like when you had dreams of your _real_ real life all those years ago. Your realities are all bleeding into each other, but Cas—Castiel—is that stitch that just won’t heal, the one that keeps opening no matter how many times you close it. And it’s getting infected.

“I know, I know I’m _getting there_ , but I need to _be_ there already,” you say to her, frustrated.

She cups your cheeks with her soft palms. “It takes time and patience, Dean Winchester. The first one is easy, but the second one...not so much. Not when it comes to you. But try. For me?”

You nod your head, your stubble _scritch-scratching_ in her hands. Before she pulls them away, you turn your chin and place a kiss in either of her palms.

“Patience,” you mull, gazing into her dark eyes and wishing they were lighter. “That, I can try. The other virtues...not so much.”

“What are you talking about? Your middle name is Chastity!”

This time, you laugh easily. You don’t even have to dig for that tiny nugget.

Car gives your butt a tap and gropes it to pull you into her. “I’ll tell you what, honey, the next time I get a full night off, I’ll teach you all about patience. Mmm-hmm?”

You nod, and you swear you hear a creak, you’re that stiff all over. Stiff everywhere but where it matters.

Carmen slides into bed in the early hours of a Thursday morning, and slides her arms around your chest, effectively spooning you. Pressing a light kiss to your neck, she whispers _goodnight_ , and buries her nose in your neck. It tickles.

“Stop that,” you half-heartedly protest, wiggling further into her hold, “but keep spoonin’ me.”

You sigh contentedly and lose yourself in the safe hold.

“Mmm. Y’always did know how t’ spoon me right. ‘F I wake up ‘n’ you’re not rubbing your junk on my butt, I want a divorce.”

There’s a shift in the bed, and you drift off again, cold.

She’s teaching you about patience. It’s the furthest you’ve gotten with Carmen since you yelled out Cas’s name while she gave you a blow job, and you’re not angling for a repeat performance.

“Come on, you can hold off a little longer,” she says sweetly as she rides you.

She’s so warm and tight and wet, and though your dick protested at first, it’s achingly hard now.

“ _Shit_...I can’t, Car, I can’t…”

“Yes, yes you can.” Carmen leans down and wipes the sweat from your brow with a plethora of pecks, and much to your displeasure slows the bounce of her hips.

It’s more of a rolling action she’s doing now, a gyrating, and _oh God it’s just like when Cas would get the urge to bottom and he’d spend what seemed like hours just rolling and gyrating and figure-eighting and circling and you’d forget everything but his name and how he felt on your dick and_

“Cas, shit, _fuck_ , yeah right there, keep doing that...holy fucking shit you’re torturing me, man. Cas, oh Cas, fuck, Cas!”

You expect a smirk or a loving comment about how he’d never hurt you (it’s either one depending on what mood Cas is in) but he stops mid-circle, and you open your eyes to see why.

“Cas?”

But it’s Carmen who’s kneeling over your dick. Carmen. Not Cas. Carmen.

Almost immediately, your dick wilts, and she climbs off, her eyes brimming and her features all pulled down. It’s disgust and hurt and disappointment, but you only feel the latter.

The last time you call her Cas is by far the most embarrassing. It’s her birthday, and it took you four attempts to write her name in the card. All previous attempts were addressed to Cas, and there’s only so many times you can try to make the _s_ look like a strange _r_ , so you had to pour all your concentration into the fifth card, which had the message:

_To Carmen,_

_With love on your birthday,_

_Dean x_

_P.s. I love you. (Remember the birthday when the movie we wanted to see was sold out, so we walked around until we found this small piano recital going on in the park? The pianist played P.S I Love You and we sung along. That’s one of my favourite memories of us.)_

Carmen smiles at the picture and the poem on the front, but frowns at the message inside.

“We’ve never been to a piano recital,” she says, confused.

“Yeah we did, remember? You were worried about your brothers meeting me, so I took you out, and took your mind off it. The word you used was ‘unforgettable’, Cas, so don’t go forgetting.”

The room falls silent, and the kids even drop the bubble wrap they’ve been furiously popping. Carmen is beet-red, with both anger and embarrassment, while everyone else looks either nervous or confused.

“I’m an only child,” Carmen flatly reminds you.

You flounder then, only able to come up with, “I – I’m so sorry,” but it’s not good enough.

You were never good enough for her. Carmen deserves more.

You let her walk away after the awkward party, and you don’t go after her.

“ _I left lasagne and pie on your porch because you wouldn’t answer the door,”_ your voicemail says in the worried tone of your mom. “ _Honey, I know break-ups are hard, and I want to help you get through this. Call me. Please. I love you.”_

You’ll pick up her calls eventually. In time. When you’re ready to look in your mother’s eyes and pretend you’re heartbroken.

Cautiously, you trudge out to your porch and hastily retrieve the food. You preheat the oven, and get ready for a night of comfort eating.

You miss Carmen. The way your relationship was before she knew about Cas. You loved her, but not in the way you should have, and you didn’t want her to get hurt like this. You didn’t want it to end like this. With you screwing up in front of everyone and forcing her to leave.

What’s worse is that you haven’t even cried, and you don’t think you’re going to.

You’re numb.

You preheat the oven.

_thump thump thump_

“Dean?”

It’s Sam. He doesn’t have lasagne or pie, only the lawyer voice he’s currently using. He might be able to convince criminals to confess, but he’s not convincing you to let him in.

_thump thump thump_

“Dean! I know you’re in there! Open up!”

He’s probably just going to give you a lecture and a powerpoint presentation on how to win Carmen back. You don’t move from the couch.

_thump thump thump_

“Come on, Dean!”

“If you know I’m in here, then you know I’m not answering the door on purpose!”

You’re also being extra dickish on purpose. It hurts, like the break-up isn’t. You spent months winning _him_ back, so to speak, and you’re tearing all that work down because you hate yourself right now.

You hate yourself right now, and isn’t that fan-fucking-tastic. It means Dean Winchester—the _real_ Dean Winchester—is finally rearing his ugly head, where you’d only seen glimpses of him before.

_thump_

“Please, Dean. I just want to help.”

Sam’s quiet, desperate voice is closer, though still muffled. He must be resting his head against the door.

“Carmen called Jess and...and she told her about why you guys broke up. About Cas.”

Fire burns in your eyes as your head whips around at the mention of your husband, and you yell, “I don’t want to talk to you! Or anyone! Just...just leave me alone, Sam.”

“If that’s what you want,” he croaks, defeated, and you hear his clown shoes creak off your porch.

Good. If there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s Sam’s deep need to have a heart-to-heart as sisters. You don’t need it in the real world, and you don’t need it here. You don’t _wish_ for it.

You turn on the T.V, and hope Dr. Sexy can make you better.

Five missed calls from Mom, three pies on your porch (apple, cherry, and pecan), a dent in your door from Sam’s fist, and a card from the twins.

More love you don’t deserve. Especially not after you’ve been pushing them away for two weeks.

You just want to be alone, so you can drink on the days you’re not working and not get judged for getting a headstart on happy hour.

You can’t be trusted not to screw up every relationship you have, so you don’t allow anyone to put their trust in you. You’ll go back to them when you’re ready. You’ll hug Mom tightly and get her cardigan wet when you bury your face in it, you’ll let the twins climb all over you and tell them jokes they shouldn’t be hearing at the age of ten, and you’ll shake Sam’s hand and thank him for trying, and pull him into a hug.

They’ll all forgive you. You know they will, because you’ll wish for it.

But, like so many other wishes, it may not come true. Your family may shun you as you did them. And you won’t blame them.

Maybe this is the perfect time to kill yourself.

You glance around your immediate vicinity and prick your ears up, but there’s no _whoosh_ , no, ‘Hello, Dean’, no trenchcoated angel.

He’d be happy, you think, to hear that you’re thinking about it again seriously. Well, as happy as Castiel can be. He’s too stoic to grin toothily. Maybe he’d just incline his head, and ready himself to forget you until he has to save you.

If you kill yourself now, you can forget the pity party your family are throwing.

If you kill yourself now, you can forget domestic happiness.

If you kill yourself now, you can forget you ever loved a man.

Your feet have walked you to the kitchen, you find, and they nudge the bottom of the counter. Or maybe the bottom of the counter is nudging you, nudging you to _do it already, you weak little boy._

Your hand pulls a knife from its block, and your lungs take a deep, regretful breath.

Your other hand slides the apple pie over, and you cut a large sliver.

Cas shows up a couple of days after everyone else has resigned themselves to leaving you alone, but you don’t shoo him away. You pat the side (that used to be Carmen’s side) of the bed next to you, a silent invitation that he actually picks up on.

“Can’t believe I didn’t have to spell that out for you,” you say out of the corner of your mouth. “The apocalypse really is upon us.”

His head dents the pillow next to you when he reclines, and you feel those soul-gazing eyes gazing into your soul.

“Not in this world,” Castiel comments, and you laugh, more than you should, because _he made a joke_.

He looks away as the corners of his mouth lift, and you take the moment to contemplate him through half-lidded eyes. After months, you still marvel at how different he looks to your Cas. Though their bodies and faces are technically identical, the way they hold themselves and the expressions they grace you with are completely different. It’s good. It helps you differentiate them from each other.

That smile doesn’t help, however. It’s the smile Cas would smile just before you kissed him, and just after.

You still think he’s beautiful. You have to, really, you married him, didn’t you? Castiel is just a different kind of beautiful to Cas. Castiel is the scary kind of beautiful you’re almost intimidated by, whereas Cas was the warm kind of beautiful.

Kind of like Carmen was.

_Carmen._

You groan and cover your face with your hands. You’re... _expelling_ all your needy lovey dovey shit onto Castiel, because now Carmen’s gone, you’ve got no-one else to give it to. You sigh and shake your head, because you’re so damn _stupid_. You should have known this would happen.

“Is everything alright?” Castiel asks stiltedly.

A bitter laugh escapes. “Yeah, everything’s peachy.”

It’s quiet for a couple of seconds, and you think maybe Cas is trying to figure out what ‘peachy’ is, or that he doesn’t quite know how to react. You’re happy to stay in silence for the while, or at least until it gets to the part when he attempts a new way to convince you to kill yourself.

“How are you?” surprises you.

It’s different phrasing, but essentially the same question; so why does it draw the something resembling the truth from you?

“Everything’s not peachy,” you softly confess, meeting his eyes through the dark.

“I thought not,” he replies, nodding to himself, “your soul is dimmer.”

You frown. “What does my soul usually look like?”

The soul-gaze is back.

“Your soul is the brightest I’ve seen.”

Your throat readies itself to scoff, but Castiel is so _genuine_ that it forgets how to do anything entirely, and you end up just gazing at him. You’re gazing into his grace as he’s staring into your soul, and you could quite happily do so for hours, for days, for years until the Djinn appears with a scythe in his tattooed hand.

Your hand itches to find Castiel’s when he smiles again, and it strikes you that you’re no longer in love with just Cas anymore; you’re in love with Castiel too.

 


	5. One Day to Save Dean Winchester

 

Gradually, you start letting the people you love back into your life. Mom first, then Sam, and then the rest. You hate to muddle Jess and the twins in with ‘the rest’, but truth is, you needed to feel like a grenade without a pin for a little while longer.

It’s your coma, you think. You still haven’t gotten over it, even though you are physically fine. But you’ve never really been mentally fine, have you? Dad knocked that out of you long before he was on a hunting trip and hadn’t been home in a few days.

You’ve never been hugged as long as when you let Mom back in. She showed up five minutes after your call, freshly baked pie in hand, and happy and sad at the same time.

“You had me so damn worried, young man,” she admonishes in a stern, cracking voice. “Don’t you ever do that again, okay?”

You nod with as much meaning as you can muster, though the heavy sigh Mom exhales seems to see right through it.

“Now, tell me all about it.”

After retrieving two forks, the both of you fall on the couch with the pie between you, and you tell her about it. You tell her about how your work schedules were never in sync, about how you hated yourself because you had to force love into your heart, about how Carmen was too good for you.

“I didn’t deserve her,” you find yourself saying on more than one occasion.

Mom’s lips thin when you say that. “Stop that. Stop telling me that. Stop telling _yourself_ that. Honey, it’s not about whether you deserved her, it’s about her happiness. Was she happy when you were together?”

“I guess,” you shrug.

“Then you deserved her.”

“But it doesn’t work like that. I mean, I wasn’t always happy when we were together, so did she deserve me?” You pause to huff a bitter breath. “Who am I kidding, _no one_ deserves me. I’m not saying that I’m too good for anyone, I’m saying that if I was a toy in a box of cereal, a kid would pull me out and be like ‘this? This is what I get for eating all that cereal? I deserve more than this’. Carmen was that kid, and I was that toy.”

“Dean…”

Mom puts aside the pie to reach across the couch and hug you again. You put an arm around her shoulders to pull her to your chest, and sigh through your nose.

Affection. Warmth. You’ve missed it.

“You don’t believe all that, do you?” Mom asks. “About being a crappy toy in a cereal box?”

“Sometimes.” _Most of the time._

“Then I have to say this – as much as I loved Carmen, you need to find someone to be with who _you_ think treats you like the prize you are.”

Carmen did treat you like a prize. You knew it then, and you know it now, and that’s why you thought and still think you didn’t deserve that. But with your mom both understanding and misunderstanding in the way moms do, you don’t flog the dead horse.

So you tell her that you’ll try to get back out there, and you bond over Dr Sexy, forkfuls of pie in your mouths when you aren’t talking about how his cowboy boots make him sexier.

“What about you?” you ask Mom through crumbs. “You gonna find anyone else to treat you like a prize?”

She blushes. “...There was someone a while back.”

Pie falls out of your mouth and into your lap. “And?”

“And it didn’t work out.” Mom shifts, uncomfortable. You stick an arm up so she can fall into the dip between your shoulder and your collarbone, and she does.

“Wanna talk about it?”

Mom sighs, and starts to talk.

His name was Saul, and Mom met him after your accident. Carmen and Jess had set her up with an online dating profile unbeknownst to her, as Mary always mentioned getting back out there romantically on their days out.

With you in hospital and in a critical condition, she had found solace in speaking with Saul online, whose niece had been in a coma for years.

After you resurfaced, his niece died, and Saul broke it off for the sake of his vulnerable heart.

“I thought I was falling in love again,” Mom whispers as a tear waters the crumbs in the foil below her.

In true Winchester style, you say nothing. Instead, you kiss her temple, and switch to _ Hoje É Dia de Maria_, where you lose yourselves in the lives of others.

Sam visits you the next day, after you’ve texted him an apology, and he brings you beer, movies, and the fiercest hug you’ve ever had.

“I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, so I thought we could get kinda drunk and make fun of movies,” he says, caution still running rings around his pupils.

“Sounds perfect, Sammy.”

He doesn’t protest the nickname you didn’t mean to give him, but your stomach does. All the same, you can’t bring yourself to rectify it, and Sam goes about picking the first film to watch.

“I missed you,” says Sam as he flicks through the language options. He’s so casual about it all, like he declares these kind of things doing mundane tasks all the time.

He probably does, too. And Jess. You picture the both of them exchanging _I love you’_ s and _I missed you so much baby’_ s while serving up dinner and while one’s on the toilet, and it’s just disgusting how at ease they are with saying how they feel and you don’t wish you could do that at all.

Not in the least.

“Missed you too,” you mutter, and out of the corner of your eye, you see a beam worthy of the sun.  

You’ve been invited around to the Winchester-Moore’s for dinner, where Jess is stirring pots on rotation, Sam is tossing a salad in front of you, Erica’s collaging on the living room floor, and Johnny’s reading some book in a foreign language while he toes his sister’s cuttings every so often. They bicker while their parents seem none the wiser, until you nudge their dad and comment, “Just like us, huh?”

Sam does that thing where he frowns incredulously and minutely, and you go back to drinking your root beer.

Dinner is served, and the conversation for the entire meal is how the twins have been doing. You hadn’t realised it was so long since you’d seen them. They’re all grown up. Well, for twelve, anyway.

“I want to be a graphic designer, like Ivan Chermayeff,” Erica announces through her ham. “He’s really cool.”

“Ugh, he’s like, eighty,” says Johnny, for which he earns a kick under the table.

Jess points her fork between the both of them. “Settle down. We have a guest.”

Rolling his eyes, Johnny whines in a cracking voice, “But it’s only Uncle Dean!”

Ever the peace-keeper (as you were around him and Dad), Sam instructs his son to tell you what he wants to do when he grows up.

“I don’t know. I like languages, so maybe I’ll be some kind of translator.” He shrugs.

It’s times like these when you can’t believe it’s not real, that they’re not real. No expense has been spared where it comes to those kids. They’re completely original characters, with their own dreams and motivations. Their own _faces._ You read somewhere that all the unfamiliar faces you see in dreams are faces stolen from crowds you walk through, as your brain can’t create new faces, but you’re sure that Johnny and Erica are new to your mind – even if they are morphs of Sam and Jess.

They’ve both got their parents’ narrow eyes, ever so slightly slanted upwards at the far corners, and ski-slope noses. While Erica’s is more pinched than her brother’s, Johnny’s is rounded at the end. And of course, Jess’s curls are still winning out over her husband’s straight locks, so the twins both have darkening spirals, though Johnny’s are tighter and springier. They’re pretty gorgeous kids, actually.

If you and Carmen had ever had kids, they’d have been pretty gorgeous too. Killer cheekbones, strong jawlines, huge eyes the colour of black coffee, and perfectly straight hair. Hell, they would have won the genetic lottery.

Still, no use in dwelling on what if’s, could be’s, one day’s, or if only’s. They’re what got you into this mess to begin with..

“Don’t worry about figuring out a career now, kiddo,” you reassure Johnny though he doesn’t particularly need it. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do til I was twenty-seven. So just do what makes you happy, alright?”

It’s somewhat quieter around the table after that, but in the gap between clearing the table and dessert, Johnny sidles up to you, biting his lip.

“Don’t go to the upstairs bathroom, okay? We put plastic wrap under the seat.”

You high-five him, thank him for the advice, and wait for the inevitable.

A yell comes from upstairs not ten minutes later, and you take great pleasure in confusing Sam and his wife.

Mom’s sick, and it’s not fair.

She went for a CT scan a couple of weeks ago, and they called her in as soon as they got the results.

Mom’s sick, and it doesn’t make sense.

The whole damn idea of your wish was that she didn’t die, so why the Hell is the Djinn backing out now?

“You son of a bitch,” you mutter over and over and over as your fingers wipe your cheeks over and over and over. “You damn son of a bitch.”

Though there’s no cure for what she has, there’s only a small chance that it’ll kill her, so you guess that makes it a little better. In the meanwhile, you don’t know if it’ll ease up or worsen, so everything has to be played by ear.

The twins come visit her twice a week: after school on a Wednesday, and with Sam and Jess on Sundays. It’s nice, getting all the family together. Even if it’s just because no one knows what the next week for Mom’s going to be like.

This should be enough for you to kill yourself, but you have to stay with Mom. You have to try and make it better by cooking for her and hugging her and drawing baths for her. You move in for a time and take the time off work to look after your mom. You’re good at looking after people; it’s what you’re paid to do (only part time, now) and what you were brought up to do. Looking out for and after Sammy has always been your priority, so it’s no problem to switch the focus to your mom, especially when Sam is doing better than ever.

“It’s gonna be okay,” you tell her every time she looks teary. “I promise.”

And every time, she cups your face, and her eyes shine as she says, “You are my little angel.”

“‘M not so little anymore,” you reply sometimes, and she always makes the effort to laugh when you do.

“You don’t know because you don’t have kids, honey, but you’ll always be my baby. Just like Johnny and Erica will always be babies to Jess and your brother. It’s a parent thing.”

And every time she says that, your heart feels as though it’s been hollowed out with a rusty scoop.

The first week you live with her, she’s breathless all the time.

The fifth, she’s breathless, tired, and can’t walk properly due to the painful lumps on her shins.

The tenth, you’re woken up every night by her dry coughs.

By the time you’ve been living with Mom for seven months, the doctors have prescribed steroids, and on more than one occasion have you caught her crying in clothes that pull at the buttons.

You call Jess, and Jess takes her out for a treat day. You don’t know what they do, but Mom comes back with a smile on her face and shopping bags in her hands, so you’re happier.

You pray that Mom will be happier too.

She smiles when she catches your eye, but when you only look at her from the corner of your eye, she isn’t happier. She holds pictures of your dad to her chest and reads cards that seemingly come from nowhere and rubs her lumps while staring at blank walls.

You pray that Mom will feel better not just in her body, but in her mind, and after a year, her symptoms miraculously ease up a little. She still has to take the steroids, but she’s getting better. _She’s getting better._ Breathing is still a little too difficult for her, but she’s getting better.

And you wonder if it’s because you prayed.

You’re clearing your head, that’s all you’re doing. You’ve finally moved back to your own place now that Mom’s capable of living on her own again, so Sam’s been chewing your ear off about Johnny and Erica, and how neither of them seem to understand what a curfew is, and you’ve been saying the same stuff you’ve always said: as long as they’re still doing well in school, and they’re not off their face every night, then they’ll be fine. They’re fourteen, it’s what teenagers do. They like to push boundaries.

God knows that’s what Sam did. Your Sammy, that is. He stayed up to all kinds of hours reading non-research books with a torch under his sheets, and ran away to learn Law at _Stanford_. It doesn’t get more rebellious than that in the hunting Winchester family.  

So your phone is off, and you’re walking at a brisk pace through empty lamplit streets. You’re getting on, you need to keep the burgers and bacon sandwiches off somehow. Granted, lifting gurneys with the dead weights of the weak on helps, but you have to be in top condition to keep up with the whippersnappers.

You snort. _Whippersnappers._ You can’t say you ever thought that you would say that unironically.

Slowing down to watch the sky, you sigh when you can’t see the stars for the fog. You and Sammy used to watch the stars on the hood of your baby, a case of beer in the cooler, and your cassettes in their boxes. It’s the one thing you haven’t tried to recreate with the Sam here – no, one of the two things, counting the Fourth of July fireworks you set off together.

You slow right down to a stop, and lean against a lamppost, still looking upwards. _You wish you could see the stars, you wish you could see the stars, you wish you could see the stars…_

Nada.

Something catches your eye. The spotlight you’re standing in is flickering, and though your immediate thought is to grab the salt, you just hope instead.

 _Swoosh_.

Your heart skips a beat, and you turn around.

“Hey,” you say in an awed breath. The lamplight the angel appeared in casts his handsome face in flickering oranges and yellows, and there’s a different kind of confidence to his stance. Castiel is different. ‘Cas’ seems more befitting to him, now.

“Hello, Dean.”

You’ll never get tired of him saying that, not when now he says it with a secret smile. What does he know that you don’t? More than you can comprehend, most likely.

“How long has it been?” he asks, searching your features for new wrinkles.

“Three years and five months.”

Not that you’ve been counting. That long must be nothing to an angel, to one who has lived for millennia. Three years and five months must simply be a blink for Cas, maybe even half of one. To him, you’re probably two blinks, maybe three if you live long enough. Your heart spasms, not fond of the thought that it is so insignificant to the one it so greatly...likes.

Cas steps closer, his rigid shoulders drooping. “I could explain the speed of time here to you with a series of partial differential equations, but I’m unsure as to whether you would appreciate that.”

“You callin’ me stupid, Cas?” You say it with half a smile, just so he knows you’re kidding. No matter your qualifications in your dreams, you only really have a GED, and high school seems so long ago. Equations aren’t something you put effort into back then; it was all about chasing monsters and chasing tail.

“Of course not,” Cas says with a genuine, gentle glint in his eye. They’re dark in this light, shadowed by his brows, but you can still see the light in them. The grace.

“As the time you have left in the real world runs out, the time you experience speeds up. A mere thirteen minutes have passed for me, but an estimated 1,793,485 minutes have passed for you here.”

It’s got to be weird for him, seeing you age three years in thirteen minutes. It’s weird for you, that’s for sure. His vessel is perpetually thirty-five, Jimmy Novak’s body frozen in time while Castiel uses it for a higher purpose. He’ll never panic about his first grey hair, never embarrassedly buy wrinkle cream so he can hang onto his youth a little longer, never bend over and worry if he’ll ever get back up. All these are in the cards for you, but not him. Castiel’s future is amongst the stars. He’ll probably fall in love with another angel and have angel babies, and teach them how to fly and not let them watch any movies and completely forget about you, because you’re just a blink of a mud monkey.

Unless he falls.

“Has an angel ever fallen?” you blurt, only surprising him slightly with the sudden change of subject.

Spider legs fan across Cas’s cheekbones, and orange illuminates his mouth when he says,  “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she fell in love.”

The spiders scurry away as his eyes meet yours, and a smile tugs at those orange lips while you try to decipher the look he’s giving you. It’s the kind of look your mother would give you sometimes, all proud and full of adoration, eyes shining with memories of you.

Maybe Cas won’t forget you, after all.

“How – how did she do it? Fall, I mean?”

“She ripped out her grace. I’m not sure what happened to her, but I can feel her grace here still. On the Earth, somewhere. She could have been reborn as a human, but…” Cas gives what you think might be an attempt at a shrug.

“You miss her.”

“As much as an angel can miss someone, yes. Anna was the leader of my garrison, and one of the few I would call a friend. I never understood why she would give up Heaven for humans before, but now...now I think I do.”

You think about asking what the catalyst was, but ultimately decide against it. You’ll only be disappointed.

Cas brusquely changes the subject. “How are your family?”

“They’re good, yeah.” You shove your hands in your pockets as a chilly breeze curves your way. “The twins are coming into that rebellious teenage stage, so Sam and Jess have their hands full. Mom got sick for a while, but she’s getting better now.” Seeing your huffed laugh in the air, you continue, “You’d hope she’d be better forever, right? I mean, her being alive is the whole reason I’m here, the whole reason I stayed. I never wanna lose her, not even to old age.”

She’s only seventy-eight, and looking good for it too, apart from the scare you had a couple of years ago. The blonde stripped out of her hair long ago, and while she still dyed it for a time, it’s all grey and white now.

“And you? How are you? And how’s Carmen?”

You kick a plastic bottle that blew your way and avoid his gaze. “Carmen and I broke up a long time ago, Cas.”

Nearly four years ago to the day. The wind pricks at your eyes, and you clench your jaw and blink rapidly.

“I’m sorry to hear that. You...you never told me.”

You shrug, hands still in pockets. “You didn’t ask, so I didn’t tell. Didn’t think it was that important, anyway.”

“Your life is always important to me.”

“‘s that so?”

“Yes,” Cas replies fiercely. Its a glimpse of how he is when he’s not around you. It’s the china lid to the butter dish he is, and only you’ve lifted it to see the butter. People would be surprised, _angels_ would be surprised that the butter’s all soft and gooey, because Cas has been left in your sun for too long.

“Dean, look at me. Please.”

You glance up. He’s inches away. There was a time that you would have reminded him about the _personal space_ rule, but that time was long ago, before you were married. Before he was _Cas_.

His fingers just graze the side of your face, and it’s so hard, so hard not to lean into the ghost of a touch that you have to squeeze your eyes tight.

“Your life is of the utmost importance to me. Perhaps it has a different meaning to me than it did when I first visited you, but I would give everything for you. I have, already, given so much for you. For you to stay here awhile longer. And I would give more.”

 _Would you fall?_ is on the seam of your lips, but you lick it away.

Cas’s trenchcoat flaps in the cold wind, the ties blowing round to flick your legs. You grasp them and tug on them, pulling Cas towards you a little more. Just a step.

 _I don’t want you to go_ , is the thought you loudly direct at him. _Stay. I need you_.

He sighs, and somehow it’s heavier than the wind.

“I must go.”

You give a small nod, and with great difficulty swallow the lump in your throat. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

The wind pricks at your eyes again, but you’re afraid that if you blink, your cheeks will be wet for hours after Cas leaves. So your eyelashes flutter, and so do the nerves in your white lips.

He looks to the sky before he flies, and just before the air thins, you ask in a tiny voice, “Will I see you again before I...before my time is up?”

“I sincerely hope so,” Cas says gravely.

And he’s gone.

And it occurs to you that he might not make it in time.

And you blink.

“Mom,” you start, and she looks at you as though she knows what you’re building up the courage to say, and it only helps you say the words, “I think I’m in love.”

She beams. “I knew it. What’s her name?”

“Um... _his_ name is Cas.” You swallow a bundle of nerves and meet her smiling eyes, which haven’t clouded with disappointment.

“How wonderful, Dean. You must bring him to meet me! That is, if you’re not embarrassed of your old mom.”

You slide your hands over her wrinkled fingers. “Of course I’m not embarrassed, but see, I can’t bring him to meet you.”

“Why not?” Her upside-down frown has righted itself, and her hands tremble under yours.

“It’s just that…”

You can’t come up with a valid excuse that’s not ' _technically you can’t see him because you’re a figment of a dream I’m having therefore he can only appear to me’_.

Until you can.

“Uh, we met online, and he’s kinda technophobic. He can barely type, let alone work a webcam.”

“That’s cute,” Mom says, a smile framing her words. “You must really love him if you can put up with his two-fingered typing.”

“I do. I really do.”

She just looks at you then, and you swear you’re four years old again and you just declared your love for the girl next door, only this time Mom’s not humouring you with that soft smile.

“So where does he live?” she asks with that tone in her voice that means she won’t rest until she knows everything about your beloved.

“All over the place, really. He’s a, um, traveling business man.”

When you first came into this world, you never thought you’d find it this easy to lie to your mother. It’s second nature now. Before Cas topped up your memory glass, before you knew you were living a lie, your nose never grew. Now, you’re lucky if you can use a lamppost to scratch the tip of it.

“Well when he travels to Kansas, tell him I’d like to meet him. I’m sure your brother would, too.” Mom gives you a pointed stare, and you nod to satisfy her.

She gets up on wobbly feet and bats your helping hands away. One day, she won’t slap you away when you go to help, and that will be the day that you think the most about ending it here. Her frail hands reach into cupboards to pull out ingredients, and it’s when she plucks the pastry brush from the cutlery drawer that your stomach reacts with a happy murmur.

“What kind of pie are you making?” you ask, joining her at the counter.

“A celebratory pie,” she says, emphasising her words with a spoon. “It’s not every day your son tells you he’s in love.”

“So if I tell you I’m in love tomorrow, will you make me another pie?”

Mom stares you down and boops you on the nose with the spoon. “Don’t push your luck, young man.”

You grin cheekily, and she doesn’t hide the slide of her mouth from stern to smiling.

“Love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, my little angel.”

Little does she know that you will be too busy in Hell to ever become an angel.

He flies into your living room as soon as you’ve sat down to watch _ Alas, Poder y Pasión_, and your pulse quickens as the plot thickens.

“Cas! You made it!”

You throw yourself at him and pull him into a tight hug, one he does not reciprocate. His hands are limp at his sides, his chin awkwardly stuck between your collarbone and armpit, and you laugh into his neck.

“This is a _hug_ , Cas. It’s what humans do when they say hello, or goodbye, or when they see someone they haven’t seen in a long time. We hug people when we missed them, or when we’re going to miss someone, or just to be affectionate.”

“Oh,” Cas says, muffled. “How do I... _hug_...back?”

You don’t say a word, you just find his arms and put them around you. When they’re snug around your waist, you comb your fingers through his hair and lead his head upwards, so his chin is hooking your shoulder now. You leave your hand in his thick, dark hair for a few moments, savouring the faux-familiarity of his hold.

It’s almost exactly like the first time you hugged him in your coma dream. Though Cas kissed you first, you hugged him when you saw him next, and he completely froze like the deer in headlights he was. Like the deer in headlights he still is. It was, and still is adorable.

Your nose buries itself in his neck like a burrowing rabbit, and draws in a lungful of his scent.

But Castiel doesn’t have a scent. You breathe him in again, but all you smell is clean, unpolluted air. It must be his grace doing its thing.

You pat him on the back twice, and part. He blinks up at you, like he expects something else, something more, but you don’t meet those expectations. You won’t. You can’t. Either one of those three.

“How are you?” Cas asks. He’s asked that—or a variation of that—every time he’s seen you since you woke up in the hospital.

“Better for seeing you,” you reply genuinely.

He looks down, and you only manage to _just_ catch it, but he represses a blush.

Castiel repressed a blush. Because you’re better for seeing him.

You grin with glee and quickly stroke the back of your hand down his ever-so-slightly pink cheek.

“How are you?” you ask. A strike of doubt flashes in your mind, and you add, “Have I ever asked you how you are?”

“I don’t think you have.”

Horror follows the doubt. “Wow, I’m kind of an awful person, huh?”

“Not at all,” Cas reassures with a small smile.

The tiny smile puts a blush on your face, so your eyes shy away from his and find something else to focus on that’s not how handsome he is.

Like his tie.

His backwards tie.

You remember a time where you might have rolled your eyes at it, but now you just smirk and fiddle with it.

“This is backwards, you know that, right?”

Cas frowns down, his hands hovering over his chest. “No. The function of a ‘tie’ eludes me. Why are they worn?”

You shrug. “To look smart, I guess. They’re professional.”

“But why? What classifies them so?”

He sounds just like Erica and Johnny when they were four, but this time you can’t direct Cas to his dad. You don’t think God would like to be interrupted just to be asked the function of a tie.

So you shrug again, and truthfully say, “I don’t know.”

You fiddle with his tie again, shifting it this way and that to get it right, but it’s no use. It’s needs to be completely redone. Your nimble fingers slide the tongue out of the knot, and straighten out the twisted material.

“Are you gonna remember how to do it if I teach you?”

“Most likely, but I do not particularly care to remember.”

You snort at his honesty. “You’re not even gonna care if it matters to me?”

Cas’s eyebrows quirk. “Why would the state of my tie be of importance to you?” he asks.

“It’s a part of your brand, part of what makes you _Castiel_. Without the tie, you’d look...I don’t know, weird. Like a bit of you was missing.”

“Do what you wish with it, and I shall retain the information,” Cas acquiesces with a sigh.

He sounds like a cute little robot, grumbling about human customs but warming to them all the while.

You show him how to tie a simple knot, the old over-over-under-up-and-through, and pat your handiwork once you’ve tightened it.

“There,” you say proudly. “Not bad, huh?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cas dryly replies, and you can’t help the laugh that your heart starts.

You pat it again, and slide your fingers down the material. It’s nylon-y, like if you scratched it it would give a high-pitched wobbly whine, and it’s weirdly silky on the underside for such a cheap tie. Without thinking, you tug on it and place a kiss on Cas’s stubbly cheek.

He balks, and represses a blush again. “Um, what was that?”

Surely he knows what a kiss is? Isn’t he supposed to have studied humanity from afar? Didn’t he once mention taking down Sodom and Gomorrah? You think sometimes he just plays dumb, because he’s noticed that you like telling him things about humanity (meaning you, really) and teaching him the little things. It’s probably why he let you tutor him in the simple tie knot, too.

You’ve never really bought into the whole ‘playing dumb to get boys’ thing, but this one, you can get behind. No one else has played that card _and_ been an angel. With the other girls, it was irritating because they should know the common sensical things they were claiming not to, but with Cas...he’s not even the same species as you. He can go from otherworldly and fiercely intelligent to cute and confused within a second, and for some reason that does it for you.

Softly, you explain, still gently grasping his tie, “It was a kiss, Cas. It’s what humans do when they like someone, when they’re fond of ‘em.”

“You’re...fond of me?” Cas’s tender eyes are big and wide, and his ears wiggle in his hair. Damn angels, being more aware of every muscle in their vessel’s bodies and utilising them to wiggle their ears all adorably.

Not that you’re jealous that you can’t wiggle your ears.

“Hey, if I was _really_ fond of you, I’d ‘a kissed you right on the money maker.”

And Cas’s mouth could make a hell of a lot of money, you’re sure. You’ve pictured the curve of it thousands of times before; in the shower; when your hand slips beneath your underwear; at work when you’re bored, and many other times. You think of his lips and your body has the same reaction as if it were to gaze upon a chick with swinging hips and a low-cut top, and it used to freak you out, but not anymore. Castiel’s lips are too gorgeous to hate for anything.

For a few seconds, you consider kissing him on the money maker. You did it without thinking all the time when you were married, but this is a different Cas. A different kisser.

Heh. Maybe you’ll have to teach him how to kiss.

You lean forward, just a hint, and hope that Cas picks up on your reasons for invasion.

Of course he doesn’t. Personal space isn’t an issue for the angel.

However, the moment you lean back and look into his eyes again, he’s switched back to otherworldly. There’s no bewilderment there any longer, just a tired disappointment. _Maybe he’s disappointed you didn’t kiss him_ , you think. But maybe he’s disappointed in you because you’re trying to distract him from his mission.

You weren’t trying to distract him at all. That didn’t cross your mind, not in the slightest. You were just trying to kiss him for the sake of kissing him.

“Dean…” he begins in that slow, disquieted tone of his, “I came here today to tell you something.”

_Cas loves you Cas loves you Cas loves you Cas lov—_

“I visited The Fates again.”

_Oh._

“They showed me your future, and – what I saw, Dean, it was...upsetting. It was you dying, three times.”

Three times? You’re only meant to die once. Twice, technically, if you count your exit from this world as a death. But you frown as you realise that you should die three times, really. Once here, once at the claws of Hellhounds, and once when you die permanently.

It’s perturbing that death is so impermanent for you, ephemeral like a dry-wipe board pen masquerading as a sharpie.

But if three times is actually correct, why was it upsetting?

“I should clarify,” he says with a bob of his head, “you died three different ways in this life, this dream. And The Fates said that it was up to you which of those deaths was the true death.”

Cas is quiet for a long moment. He holds your eyes, imploring you to find the ball under the shuffled cups, but it would help if you actually knew what those cups looked like.

The angel tells you before you part your lips to ask.

“Either the Djinn drains you as you live out your last days, you kill yourself before that happens, or I kill you if you fail.”

You whistle lowly. It’s the first time since you met him that he actually sounds convinced he can kill you.

“The world needs Dean Winchester. Sam Winchester needs Dean Winchester.” Castiel’s face is all soft lines as he doesn’t say the one thing you want to hear, but it hardens in all his celestial majesty as he firmly tells you, “If I see you again here, I will finish my mission.”

The last time you’ll ever see him is either now, or when he kills you. You don’t know which is worse.

You grab his tie so he can’t fly away. “Cas, wait, let me—”

There’s no scratch of nylon as the tie disappears from your fingers. There’s no goodbye kiss.

Cas is gone. There is only Castiel, now.

And he’s gone too.

He appears again sixty-five days later, in your bedroom. You’ve been waiting for him, though you’ve been telling yourself you haven’t.

Castiel has now become one of the reasons you’re staying in this world, you slowly realise.

You don’t tell yourself he isn’t.

“What day is this for you?” you ask him, only mildly interested in how long you have left.

“The fourth.”

“So the last, huh?”

“Yes.”

Cas is always to the point. You’re going to miss having someone around like that. No lies, no dancing around or distracting...just what needs and wants to be said.

“When I’m dead, when the djinn’s drained my life force...I’m gonna miss you, Cas.”

He steels at your words. “You will not die at his hand, that is a promise.”

“But I am gonna die at the hand of the apocalypse?”

“Perhaps.” A line appears between Cas’s brows, and his lips look as though they want to worry at themselves.

“What’s eating you?”

Cas scans his vessel with confused eyes and then narrows them at you. “That is...a metaphor?”

A forbidden smile plays on your lips at that. “Yeah, Cas, it’s a metaphor.”

The smile drops when Cas speaks, always to the point.

“It’s time.”

 _No._ You’re still not ready, you haven’t said goodbye, you haven’t found Carmen and apologised for everything, you haven’t bought the twins’ birthday presents yet, you haven’t hugged your mom today. There’s still so much you want to do, still so much you _can_ do here. You’re better here, you like yourself here, and you don’t want to forget that.

You don’t want to forget Cas.

And you don’t have to.

“Cas, you could stay here, with me,” you babble. “Fuck the other angels, who cares about them? It could be just like how it was when we were married, _please_ Cas, don’t – just don’t do whatever you’re about to do, please, I know you, and—”

“Stop it,” Cas says quietly. “Stop it. Do you not think that I have thought about you, about being with you, or that I have not weighed up staying with you versus staying an angel?”

You’re silent, and guilt creeps into your skin. How could you expect Castiel to fall for you? _Though,_ a tiny voice says in the back of your mind, _at least you know he loves you for sure now._

An overwhelming need to tell him you love him surges within you, and you can feel it bubbling inside you, can feel wings breaking through the chrysalises in your belly, so you open your mouth and let the butterflies out.

“Cas, I lo—”

You almost bite your tongue when Castiel’s mouth crashes into yours. It’s a clumsy kiss, with your teeth clinking together, but it’s also feverish and worshipful and delicate all at the same time. He nibbles on your pliable lips before licking over them, and you think he’s about to stop so you fist your hands in that stupid trenchcoat of his and pull him closer, kissing him hard.

You only let go when your knees stop feeling as though they’re going to buckle, and Cas’s forehead leans against yours as your hands lift to cup either side of his stubbled jaw. You remember doing this in your coma dream, stroking your thumbs along the drag of the coarse hair and rubbing the tips of your fingers in his messy hair, and it just feels _right_. His breath feels hot against your mouth still, and you’re certain that yours does his, too. The air is thin, which is no doubt due to the panting both of you are doing in the small space between your lips, and it only adds to the high you’re on.

“Dean Winchester,” Cas starts, and you close your eyes and wait for him to complete the words he interrupted. “I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

There’s a _shing_ , the impossible awaited sound of a steel blade being unsheathed, and a sharp pain piercing through where the butterflies had broken free of their cocoons. You take in a quick breath and open your eyes, but you see nothing. No Cas, no bedroom; just darkness.

 

You blink again, and when your eyes focus, you find that you’re in a warehouse, with Sam and a half-dead Djinn at your feet. Your hands are in ropes now, gripping nothing, though you aren’t sure what they were holding before. You think it was something important.

A grunt comes out when you try and call Sam’s name. You grunt again in displeasure that your throat is dry, and you sway in your ties, barely able to hold yourself up.  

Sam’s head snaps up, his eyes swimming with lost little boy tears. He scrambles to his feet, and his voice cracks when he says, “Thank God, Dean, I thought I lost you!”

“Yeah, well...no place like home, Auntie Em.”

Your little brother manages a watery smile. “Let’s get you down.”

He cuts through the ropes, then runs the Djinn through with the same knife. You feel a phantom wound in your stomach at the sight of it and instinctively your fingers fly to stop the blood, but there’s nothing. Perhaps you got the balls to kill yourself after all.

There was a girl, you remember, but looking around the empty warehouse, you don’t see her body, dead or alive. It leaves you emptier, like lungs puttering out their last breaths before taking another in. You breathe in on reflex, and you’re still empty. Something big is missing, but it can’t be, because Sam is here with his arm looped around your back.

Maybe it’s your ability to walk properly.

Sam insists on driving, something you haven’t got the energy to fight. You don’t talk, simply content for the while to listen to the roar of the Impala and Led Zeppelin filling the silence. But Sam, being the girl he is, swallows and starts to talk.

“I thought I lost you, I really did. You were out for days, and I was only there for one of ‘em. I’m – I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

“S’fine, Sammy.”

“No, it’s not. Because while I was caught up with research, and then taken hostage by some demon, you were dying. And I knew, I _knew_ that something had happened to you. I could feel it.” In a smaller voice, he admits, “I started praying, Dean. To God, to the angels, to anyone who could...who could _divinely intervene_ if I couldn’t save you.”

You snort and find the energy to roll your eyes. “Good thing I got myself out then, huh?”

Sam keeps his eyes on the road.

“Angels, yeah right,” you scoff, shaking your head at Sam’s naivety. “As if an angel would ever save me.”

 

 

_**Dean Winchester Is Saved** _

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So this idea came about last year, while I was writing my first big bang. It was something I was so enthusiastic about I scribbled a plan then and there at work, and it lay with my 'important documents' (other fic plans) until I decided to use it for my big bang – well, mini bang, as I thought, _'this isn't going to be more than 20k!'_ As usual, I was a mile off at predicting my own word counts.
> 
> I was very trepidatious throughout writing this, worrying if people would like the premise but hate the story, be put off by the POV, or the format, hence why I enlisted all my betas. They helped in every way they could, and for that I am ever grateful! Here they are again: [Alicia](http://moderatelysexyformyshirt.tumblr.com), and [Tara](http://carry-on-wayward-idjit.tumblr.com) and [Liesl](http://revengingcas.tumblr.com), who did some lovely last minute looking over! Also, thanks to [Miriel](http://gothicmiriel-of-the-fandoms.tumblr.com), whom I made answer too many questions about it after she read it. <3
> 
> How can I go any longer without thanking my fabulous artist? I can't, so Tracy, get ready to be thanked! From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being so enthusiastic about the story and doing more than the required two pieces, it was so so lovely to receive your progress pics and your personality in my inbox! :D Your style is beautiful and I still fawn over it! And last but certainly not least, thank you, because you were my cheerleader as much as you were my artist. <3
> 
> Thanks to the mods, who did a ridiculously good job this year considering about three billion writers signed up, thanks to [Emile Pandolfi](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=emile+pandolfi) for playing music I am inspired by, and thanks to you, for reading! If you enjoyed it, please don't hesitate to leave kudos, comments, or an [ask](http://ghostran.tumblr.com/ask). I'd love to know what you thought!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for "Whatever You Wish For"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2469485) by [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/pseuds/TKodami)




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